Stealing Victory at the Speed of Lightning
by wille179
Summary: Nobody said reincarnation worked perfectly, or that you'd end up in Konoha, or that you'd even end up in the canon universe. Kenta's not bothered by any of that. Reborn in Kumogakure to a clan of bloodline thieves, Kenta's more than happy to live his own life and follow his own ambitions, even when said ambitions take him to strange places. OC-centric.
1. 1 Striking Lightning

_A/N: As of this story going live, I've got 15 chapters/57k words done, which I'll publish periodically over the next few weeks. After that, updates will become irregular. Enjoy._

* * *

Deep in the Land of Lightning, there was a clan of ninja known as the Kaminyojin, a clan that bore a minor bloodline. Their dense chakra simultaneously acted like both lightning chakra and neutral chakra. It naturally made their bodies grow bigger and stronger, slightly enhanced their senses, and gave them a permanent physical and mental speed boost. In essence, it was a lesser but permanently active version of the Raikage's _Lightning Release Chakra Armor_. As they grew stronger, the boost became more significant — though, as a bloodline, it would never compete with the likes of the three greatest dōjutsu.

As a portmanteau of _Kaminari Kyojin,_ literally _Thunder Giants,_ their name was an apt one. They produced many, many powerful frontline combatants, all of whom were terribly fast and shockingly dangerous — pun intended.

But there was a drawback to their bloodline. The enhanced speed of their nerves made them think and move faster, and while that was great on the battlefield, it meant that they perceived time differently than the rest of humanity. A minute to them would be only a few seconds to everyone else, and thus, they had trouble interacting with just about normal people. Their rapid speech was hard to understand, while others seemed to speak agonizingly slowly to the Kaminyojin.

This led to them becoming recluses, to such an extent that they lived in a district of their own on the outskirts of Kumogakure. Relations between them and their village were never very close. Then, after their losses during the Firsts Shinobi World War, that relationship went even further south.

While the situation was similar to the Uchiha situation that would form in Konoha decades later, their response was vastly different. Instead of attempting to claim power within their village, they sought to bring in new blood from the outside. Thus, the practice of blood plundering was born.

Kaminyojin kunoichi went out and raped men with bloodlines. Through genjutsu-based coercion or physical assault and electrostimulation of the genitalia, the women extracted the seed of many ninja. While highly unpopular among those both inside and outside Kumogakure, the practice did produce results.

Including me, Kaminyojin Kenta.

Any guess who my father is?

I'm serious, any guess? Because I have no idea. Your guess is as good as mine. Mom didn't exactly ask his name before _raping_ him to death. What I do know is that the caged bird seal apparently doesn't stop a Hyūga from having kids with the wrong people. If it didn't, I wouldn't have been here.

I'd be dead.

Life is weird. Death was even weirder.

And I fully admit, I'm the weirdest of them all. And before you ask, yes, my fangs are fake. I bribed a medic ninja to grow them for me. Aren't I allowed to celebrate the fact that I came back from the dead with an obvious homage to classic vampires? Though, I doubt real vampires also had their bodies covered from head to toe in satanic-looking tattoos.

Did I mention I like body modification? Because I really fucking love body mods.

 _Anyway..._

To formally introduce myself, I am Kaminyojin Kenta, formerly Niko Gabris. Biologically, I'm age 16 and chronology, I'm 37. I'm a special chūnin of Kumogakure, promoted to that strange more-than-a-genin-less-than-a-chūnin rank for two reasons: my hyper long-range combat specialty, and my status as a breeding stud.

Yes, you heard me right: breeding stud. My clan and village demand that I sired a bunch of children like a prized racehorse or something. Basically, I ejaculate into a tube once a week and receive a steady supply of D-Rank pay. It's a bit humiliating being treated as nothing more than a seed bank, but money is money. Plus, the clan was allowing me to form my own branch family with all my sons and daughters once I reached jōnin, so there's that to look forward to.

All things considered, life's not too bad for me. And, maybe soon, I'll be promoted to full chūnin.

* * *

"What the hell do you mean, 'I'm being demoted to genin'!? And for clan-related punishment?!" I roared.

Really, I should have held my tongue. Normally, I don't get mad about much, and when I get mad, I usually grumbled instead of shouting. But this? This was an exception... at perhaps the worst possible time. Why?

Because I'd been shouting at the Raikage, and his fist was now flying at my face.

"Shut up, you brat!" he shouted back as I picked myself up off the floor. I straightened out my mask, ignoring the slight dent in the solid metal. "If you're let me explain rather than exploding at me, you'd understand." His voice, to me, sounded like an irritatingly lazy drawl. I had to remind myself that it was actually him talking at a normal speed and me hearing it too quickly. Logic didn't help my irritation, though.

I grumbled, "Yes, Sir," saying it slowly and carefully enunciating each syllable. Now would not be the time for my clan's high-speed dialect to cause miscommunication.

"Good. Sit." I did. The Raikage said, "Now, if you hadn't exploded in my face, I would have explained that this was an _on-paper_ demotion only as, I'm sure you're aware, you're definitely chūnin material already. Hell, Kenta, if I'd had my way back when I first saw your potential, I'd have had you on track to being a special- _jōnin_ by now at a minimum, and definitely within ANBU."

"So, why...?"

"Two reasons: internal politics, and Konohagakure."

I blinked. "Konoha, sir?"

Was it something to do with the Hyūga Clan?

"I bet you're picturing the Hyūga, aren't you? While they are definitely part of your own clan's reasoning for keeping you out of the spotlight, they're not why I bring Konoha up. No, I think you're more than strong enough to take care of yourself in hostile territory, yourself _and a team_ , for that matter."

It clicked. "The Konoha Chūnin Exams. You want a ringer."

Lord Ay grinned, the sort of expression that filled a room with his presence. "Exactly. For you and the other two I have in mind, you three need a proper introduction onto the world stage, and Kumogakure as a whole would benefit. Tell me, has anyone explained to you the concept of public and private ninja?"

"No, Lord Raikage." I shook my head, then brushed back the spikes of my (fucking awesome anime-style) hair out of habit. People said the habit made me look frustrated, but I wasn't — I was genuinely curious as to what he was going to say.

"Public ninja are the ones you put on a battlefield and show off to the world. They are your sword and shield, shining in the sunlight. They are powerful, but ultimately, you cannot hide that you have them — so you don't," he explained. "Conversely, you have private ninja, who hide in the shadows cast by your public ninja. You never see them, and if they do their job well, you never will. Many of them look and act like civilians. Some of them don't even have useable chakra. But they are just as important and just as, if not more, dangerous. They gather information and go where famous ninja cannot. And while they _are_ a powerful tool, ninja villages are _businesses."_

"Ah." I nodded. "And I'm the advertisement. You can't exactly advertise our spies, now can you?"

The Raikage chuckled lightly. "No, you cannot. But we are in the business of war. And, that being what it is, I have a mission for you." He pulled out the corresponding scroll, sealed with a B-Rank marker. "Participate in the third round of the Konohagakure Chūnin Exams three months from today. Put on a show for our potential clients and represent the quality of our village. Your promotion to chūnin is guaranteed if you make it to the third round, regardless of how you do, but I wouldn't disappoint me if I were you. You have a month and a half to meet with your new teammates and train with them, then a week to get to Konoha. Your assigned jōnin sensei will have more information. Understood?"

I saluted. _This_ is what I'd been wanting to hear. "Yessir, Lord Raikage."

"Good. You are dismissed."

* * *

The next morning, I made my way to training ground six, as instructed by the memo in the mission scroll. It was one of the larger, more distant grounds that was better suited for large-scale combat practice.

With my byakugan active, I saw my teammates long before they saw me. One of them was Kaminyojin Katsumi, a cousin of mine. I didn't know her all that well, but we've spoken on friendly terms from time to time. If I recalled correctly, her bloodline was from Iwagakure — explosion release, I think? Not sure, though that sounded right.

The other was a boy I'd thought was just her friend, but I revised that up to teammate now. I've never spoken to him and never learned his name, but I recognize his face and the mask covering it.

The byakugan was so far beyond X-Ray vision, it's _hax_. Like the fact that masks don't do anything, I can see through vaults, read rolled-up scrolls, see people's internal organs, see chakra, see infrared and ultraviolet, and so much more. Even if he wanted to hide his identity from me, there's no way that that oni mask he's wearing—

My thoughts ground to a halt as a new thought, a comparison to something from my past life, bubbled up to the surface of my consciousness. _Naruto_ was hardly the only series I enjoyed, and this particular team reminded me of a certain trio of super-villains from _Worm_. Sure, the analogy was only superficial at best, and I _was_ making quite a few assumptions, but the thought made me smile anyway.

I picked up the pace, using my chakra to help me move faster and not bounce away. If there was one thing I hated about my bloodline, it was how an accelerated perception of time messed with your perception of gravity. If you're three times faster, gravity seems three times slower, and if you're strong enough to move "normally" at that accelerated speed, you have to act as if you're in low gravity. A single step too hard will send you bouncing all over the place. You know those videos of astronauts bouncing on the moon? Imagine that without 200 lbs. of space suit and with ninja strength. _Yeah_. So while most other ninja don't think of it as such, when I say that I'm using my chakra to help me move faster, I'm actually saying that I'm using my chakra to adhere to the ground so that I don't bounce off in microgravity.

As fun as it is to bounce around like I'm on the moon, I did have somewhere to be. With another mental push, I closed the final gap between myself and my new teammates, appearing in a burst of chakra lightning. "Team Haruka?" I probed, just to be sure. With my byakugan, I double-checked the information in my mission scroll (mostly to learn the guy's name: _Lee Takeshi._ )

"That's us. I didn't know the Raikage would be sending us _you,_ cousin," Katsumi replied using our clan's dialect. Then she frowned. "What happened to your mask?"

I slipped back into the clan's dialect as well, happy that I didn't have to slowly drawl everything to be understood. "This wasn't what I was expecting either. I, ah, might have gotten a little upset at Lord Ay before he fully explained what was going on. For the sake of the mission, I've been demoted back down to genin. He opened with my demotion, no context."

Katsumi winced. "Yeah, I can see now how that whole scenario played out. You're lucky he didn't snap your neck or something."

I rubbed the dent on my mask. "Having a metal plate between his fist and my face was a good thing."

"I'll say," she agreed.

I glanced at Takeshi, who, if his body language was any indication, was utterly uninterested in participating in our conversation. He wasn't hostile or anything, just disengaged. I gave him a polite bow. Switching back to slow-speech, I introduced myself to my other new teammate. "Hello, Lee Takeshi. I am Kaminyojin Kenta, but you can just call me Kenta."

He bobbed his head in acknowledgment but didn't say a word. His hand, which had been on the hilt of his sword since I'd arrived, dropped down to his side.

"Where's your sensei?" I queried.

"Haruka will be here soon, I think. She's just running a bit late," Katsumi replied.

The words were already starting to form on my lips when I noticed someone with jōnin-level chakra reserves body-flickering towards us. "What, did sensei get lost on the road of life?"

"Not lost," the newly-arrived kunoichi replied. She held up a bag full of red-bean buns. "Just making a detour for snacks."

With my byakugan active as it usually was, I didn't need to turn to see her. But, out of politeness, I did anyway. My mask had no eye-holes, so the gesture was even more pointless, but people relaxed more when I gave the impression that I was listening. "Hello, sensei. I'm Kaminyojin Kenta, your new, temporary student." I handed the short, busty jōnin the mission scroll.

She set the bag of buns on the ground, then went to open the scroll only to pause. "You didn't open it?" Haruka asked, referring to the unbroken Raikage's seal on the side.

"No, but I read it anyway," I answered, hoping that my smug feeling wasn't creeping into my voice.

"How?"

I took off my mask and showed her my white, featureless eyes.

"Oh. You're the kid with the freaky bullshit eyes."

Nope, there was no stopping the smug grin. It commandeered my face, in all it's smug glory. "The freakiest, most bullshit of eyes," I agreed.

"Heh. I like you already, kid." Her eyes drifted down to the scroll she was already unrolling, having broken the seal a few seconds before. She quickly skimmed the relevant parts of the document, verifying its authenticity and taking in the details pertaining to herself. "Hm... well, _almost_ everything seems to be in order, but if you're going to be a part of this team, we're going to have to get to know each other." Haruka cast her gaze at her other students. "You two remember how we did introductions last time, right?"

Takeshi, making noise for the first time since we'd met, groaned, while Katsumi facepalmed. "Cheer up, you two!" their teacher exclaimed. "Unlike last time, you'll be on _my_ side."

This caused Takeshi and Katsumi to both cheer up immensely. "Oh, you're in for it now," my cousin taunted.

* * *

 _Introduction War_ was the name of the game. It was a bit like freeze tag, with three major differences. First, lethal weapons were both allowed and encouraged. Second, everyone was "it" for those on the other side; a clean hit counted as a tag. Lastly, and most importantly, was the "introduction" part of it.

Everyone would introduce themselves, and whoever had the most interesting introduction got the biggest head start. Since it was three-on-one in this case, we changed that such that my introduction was put on a scale of 1 to 10, and that determined how many seconds of head start I got.

Then they'll chase me. I have to take them out before they take me out. When someone is "out," they have to freeze in place until one of their teammates comes and rescues them, or they have to tell the person who tagged them something interesting about themselves in order to be let go. Obviously, the game continued until Haruka decided we'd done enough.

"You understand the rules?" Sensei asked.

"Got it."

"Good. Now, Kaminyojin Kenta, what would you like to tell us about yourself?"

Well, if good introductions bought you time, I may as well start with the bombshell. "I, Kaminyojin Kenta, was reincarnated. I have the full memories of my previous life as _**sıɹqɐ**_ ꓨ _**oʞıN.**_ "

Yes, I knew why my old name, my old language, or anything I created using memories from my old life came out twisted. I despised thinking about it, though. Suffice to say, there's one hell of a reason why I'm a walking brown-note factory, a humanoid abomination if one looked too closely. I was just glad I could speak the local language without issue. My soul wasn't _that_ corrupted.

 _Yet_.

They all stared at me for a good two seconds of real time (six or so from my subjective time) before responding. Haruka quipped, "You're supposed to say real things, not make stuff up and do... whatever the hell you just did with your voice." She shuddered a bit.

"I don't particularly care if you believe me or not, but it _is_ the truth. I'll be going now." And with that, I body-flickered away.

I ran hard, not focusing on their reaction to my statement or weird voice, but rather where I was going. The training field was rocky and jagged from battles past, but there were plenty of still-standing spires of rock. Picking the tallest one I could see, I ascended it as fast as I could, even going so far as to use chakra strings to winch myself up faster. I may not have been the fastest runner in my clan of speed-freaks, but _climbing_? I'd practiced that a lot for one very specific reason.

I reached the top within four seconds of having started running. Two seconds after that, I had unrolled the medium-sized scroll that had been strapped to my waist and unsealed one of the numerous tools I'd kept within.

The bow I withdrew didn't have nearly the range of my railguns, nor the raw destructive power of my puppets, but here and now, this bow and its iron arrows were more than enough.

Grabbing one of those arrows, I charged it with my lightning chakra and fired. It landed inches from Katsumi's feet, exactly where I'd wanted it to go, and discharged. Thanks to her bloodline, the shock was painful but hardly damaging to her. To anyone else, the shock would be quite a bit more heart-stopping.

Takeshi grabbed Katsumi and helped her up. Haruka, after only sparing a glance to confirm that Katsumi was alive and relatively unharmed, charged towards me and _holy fuck, she's fast!_

I leaped off the spire that I'd fired from, aiming for a second one. Haruka was right behind me. I twisted around mid-air and fired two things: an uncharged arrow at my new sensei, and a chakra thread at a stone pillar at a right angle to the way I'd launched myself. My thread went taut, yanking me to the side in an otherwise impossible fashion. (Thank you, _Attack on Titan,_ for the inspiration).

As for my arrow, despite its significant speed and mass, Haruka _barely_ managed to block it. If it had been charged, the arrow would have punched right through her kunai and her body.

I landed, then spun around to block a strike from below.

How the hell did Takeshi—

Wait. All three of them are speedsters.

Fuck.

I'm not that fast. I'm a sniper and—

 _Gah! Fuck you, Katsumi! Stay away!_

—and a puppeteer, not a melee speedster! I need to—

 **Thwack.**

Sensei landed a good, solid hit in my chest. I'd seen it coming from a mile away, but with Takeshi's sword on my left and Katsumi's kunai aimed to my right, there was no way I could move anywhere fast enough to avoid the hit.

"Tag."

I coughed. Unlike in a real fight or traditional spar, that single hit stopped the action, allowing me a moment to recover.

"Alright, reincarnation, what's that about?"

"I was born on a different world as a member of a similar-ish species," — I gestured to myself — "but has some major anatomical differences." Namely a chakra system and a couple other small organs I couldn't quite identify and had never heard of in my college anatomy classes. I think some of those are the chakra gates, but there's other stuff too.

"You're an _alien?!_ " Katsumi exclaimed.

" _Was_ an alien," I countered. Then, in an explosive burst of chakra, I body-flickered away again. Knowing that they'd be on me again any second, I kept running even as I reached for the chakra to unseal a different storage seal, one hidden among the tattoos on my chest.

 _Poof._

As the smoke cleared, I slipped into the shell of my massive puppet. Normally, I didn't ride in it, but right now, the Draconic Aerial Kinetic Killing Assaulter, otherwise known as the DAKKA, made for a great fortress. And, you know what they say about dakka...

 _ **MOAR DAKKA!**_

So, when the giant, mechanical dragon appeared in front of them, lightning chakra arcing off the metal spines, mouth-guns aimed at them, they froze.

"That's just not fair," Katsumi whined.

"I am Kenta!" I had my puppet roar. "I am a dragon, and you are now dead!"

And then my puppet breathed fire. _Railgun_ fire, to be precise.

Relatively speaking, shooting with _any_ of my dragon's many railguns, kunai launchers, and senbon launchers was a pain. Nothing ever went _quite_ where I wanted it thanks to the degree of separation between me and the weapon itself. But, at under twenty meters, I could hit anything _with_ anything. Such as, for example, the ground directly around my future teammates' feet.

Takeshi replaced himself with a cloud clone that continued forward until my railgun fire shredded it, while the others body-flickered away. I don't think that he quite knew that I could still see the real him, or that I could tell the clone and the original apart. To show that I could, I casually flicked my dragon puppet's tail and from it fired a kunai at him, which struck a glancing blow on his shoulder. As per the rules of the game, he froze in place.

As the other two were momentarily distracted by trying to observe my puppet and plan around it, I chose to ask the oni-masked boy a question. "What's your favorite jutsu?"

Okay, so maybe that wasn't the most inspired of questions. Forgive me if I can't think of anything better to ask the boy I've literally never spoken to during the middle of combat.

"Ken." He lifted his sword a bit, then shrugged.

Kenjutsu? "Ah. I see. Now, if that cut on your shoulder isn't bothering you too much, shall we continue?"

* * *

"Whew." Haruka wiped her brow of sweat with one hand as she stretched the other's shoulder. "That was a workout."

I, meanwhile, lay on the ground, panting. Power, I had plenty. Stamina? Well, I was no Uzumaki, that's for sure. Plus, that dragon weighed a ton, especially with me inside it. Throw in the near constant use of my byakugan, my accelerated body, and the three-on-one nature of the fight, and it's no wonder that I'm the most exhausted of the group.

As we'd fallen into the rhythm of the battle, I'd spent more and more time running away and shooting to play keep-away; thus, hits on either side became much rarer. Plus, when you consider how they always chose to free each other, I didn't end up learning all that much about my teammates, personality wise. But, I could tell that they were desperately curious about me as well.

I also learned about their battle techniques. Katsumi _did_ have explosion release, which she used quite often. Meanwhile, Takeshi was rather liberal with his cloud clones and, when he wasn't attacking me with his sword, he was using some of Katsumi's custom explosives. Lastly, our sensei was a pure speed-oriented taijutsu specialist.

"Fun," I muttered in agreement. Haruka was right, it _had_ been an excellent workout. With my chakra now as low as it was, my bloodline had weakened and slowed me down. It let me talk at a much more reasonable speed.

Katsumi sat on her knees next to me, metaphorical stars in her eyes. Meanwhile, Takeshi lingered nearby, _coincidentally_ within full earshot of me. "What was your homeworld like?" Katsumi asked.

"Advanced. Far more technology than here, and we actually understood it." You know the anachronism of _Naruto's_ technology? TVs, primitive computers, and VHS tapes, but no guns, cars, or modern body armor? Yeah, there was a reason for that: tech summoning. Ninja could summon objects (but not living creatures) from other worlds to use, despite not having the base technology level needed to run them or even understand it. Why they tended to get the items they did (or failed to get the items they didn't), nobody knew for certain.

"We even built ships that could sail to other worlds and to our own moon, and we built a system that effectively lets everyone communicate with huge numbers of people at once, share vast amounts of information, and communicate in real time with anyone, anywhere." They don't have rockets or the internet. That first one's a bit disappointing, but maybe not having the latter is a good thing. I'm not all that interested in seeing what memes ninja come up with, thank you very much.

(Though... ninja porn. Sex jutsu are definitely a thing in this world, so I'm curious as to how that would mix with Rule 34.)

"It still seems a bit far-fetched to me. Maybe I could buy you being reincarnated — chakra can do some weird shit — but you being an alien?" Haruka quipped. "I don't buy it."

Smirking, I switched to my garbled English. _**"**_ _ **¿ə**_ ๅ _ **doəd ʎɯ ɟo ɓuos əɥʇ noʎ ɓuıs oʇ əɯ ʇuɐʍ noʎ o**_ ꓷ _**·ıəsuəS ʻəɓɐnɓuɐ**_ ๅ ๅ _ **ɐuıɓıɹo ʎɯ ʞɐəds**_ ๅๅ _ **ıʇs uɐɔ I"**_

The three of them clapped their hands over their ears. My voice hurt people who to listened to it. A few words didn't do much, but the effect grew significantly depending on how much they heard. The same happened to any written English or drawings I did of things from my previous life — just looking at them gave people headaches.

" _Ow,_ fuck, what was that?" my new teacher demanded.

"I said, _'I can still speak my original language, Sensei. Do you want me to sing you the song of my people?'_ Just a simple question, spoken in _**ɥsı**_ ๅ _ **ɓu**_ ꓱ _ **,**_ my native tongue."

She swallowed. "No, I'm good. I believe you; you're an alien. _**Please**_ don't sing." The other two nodded their fervent agreement.

" _Darn,"_ I pouted childishly. "And I used to sing in the choir, too."

"Yeah, still no." The jōnin shook her head. "Anyway, welcome to the team, I guess. This next month-and-a-half is going to be hard-as-hell for you because I'm going to train your ass into the ground. Got it?"

"Yes, Ma'am!"


	2. 2 Roaring Thunder

For lack of a calculator, I ran the numbers in my head. One half of thirty-seven plus seven. Twenty-five point five. Damn.

Wait... One half of twenty-six, plus seven. Twenty. Double damn.

The half-plus-seven rule, a guy's best friend for figuring out if it was creepy to date someone. If I were _actually_ sixteen, Katsumi would be _just_ outside the safe range, such that by the time a hypothetical relationship started between us, everything would've been cool.

But I'm _not_ a sixteen year old. I'm a thirty-seven-year-old man who's gone through puberty for the second time. And let me tell you, _your mind is not made to go through puberty twice._ I've developed a sex drive while already having the one from my last life. Yeah. Not fun.

True, I was using the American standard of dating appropriateness, not the _Kumo_ one. Here, the age of consent was a mere thirteen years old. Still not touching her, though.

But, I could always go for older women, right? Well, by the half-plus-seven rule, the youngest women I could date without it being creepy on my end would be twenty-six. But that made _me_ too young for _her_ , physically speaking.

... I'm going to die a virgin in this life too, aren't I?

On the bright side, both Haruka and Katsumi both have nice boobs and butts, and watching them fling them around — I mean _spar_ — is entertaining enough, even if I'll never get to touch.

God fucking damn double puberty.

Training. Focus on training. Focus on the mission. The Chūnin Exams. Those are coming up, and I have to be prepared for the... the _finals._

 **Shit.**

I have no idea what the status of the timeline is. Has my existence caused a butterfly effect? I know there was no Hyūga Affair — my existence made kidnapping Hinata a waste of time — and I knew that the Kyūbi had attacked Konoha when I was three, but other than that, I had no idea what was going on.

Would the attack play out the same way? Would it still happen? Hell, was I in an alternate timeline altogether?

No idea. That bothered me.

Worse, I've had nearly twenty years to forget stuff. I wasn't exactly the most detail-oriented fan of the show back when I did watch it, and the series had been over for a while before I actually kicked the bucket. Not to mention the eternity-in-an-instant that I spent floating in the _**ssʎq**_ ꓯ, or the bloodline-induced accelerated mental time I've been living in since being reborn.

Basically, I've forgotten all but the simple shit. The sudden presence of chakra within me when I'd been born gave me the incentive turn trivial memory into an actual skill, but the fact that I couldn't have acted on any other details even if I'd wanted to condemn my memories of _Naruto_ to being forgotten.

So, would the attack play out the same way, or was I in an alternate timeline? How would I know? How _could_ I know?

At least, while I pondered the unknowable, I had a great view of bouncing boobs and butts, in glorious 360°, clothes-penetrating, high-definition vision.

... And now I feel like a creep again. _'Undressing her with your eyes'_ had never been so literal. And yet the bulging veins around my eyes didn't go away, and in fact, were joined by bulging veins much further south.

Okay, Kenta, focus on something else. Study their chakra, how it flows within their... _curvaceous_... bodies. How it flows, how it swells, how it fills them up until they're about to burst, how it rises up, and how it finally spurts outward into the world in a final release.

Fuck, now I've gone and made chakra itself sexy... Note to self: research or invent sex jutsu.

Oh, look, here comes Takeshi. I watched him draw his blade and begin his training routine. He thrust, he swung, he infused his chakra into the blade — all things common to training. Of course, my horny and perverted mind started sizing him up as well. _Aaannnd..._ all signs point to the fact that he's going to grow up sexy too.

Finally just giving up, I deactivated my byakugan, blinding myself. My mask _only_ had holes for me to breathe through; the solid metal around my eyes may have protected them, but it obscured the beauty of the world from my mundane sight.

Now blind, I was free to fully concentrate on what I _should_ have been doing all this time: working out. There was still a sense of me-versus-them in our group dynamic, and as such, other than giving me some advice, Sensei had just left me to my own devices while she focused on her younger students.

As she had so succinctly put it, and as our mock battle had shown, I was still rather pathetic at dealing with melee-range enemies. So, having done some stretching and some weight lifting to warm up, I began running through the kata of my clan's taijutsu style as fast as I could. Speed was the key, and at this point, it was more of an issue of mental consolidation than of _learning_ the techniques. In essence, I had to teach myself not to think three thoughts in a row — _A,_ then _B,_ then _C_ — but one thought with all three _— ABC._ It was also a very different sort of training than learning to use a firearm.

I loved it.

I'm not kidding when I say that I've developed a love for training and physical exertion. I think it's an innate reaction from this body. After who knows how many generations of people fighting, where generations of a single family fought without interruption, the level of natural selection pressure was ridiculous. The degree of difference between a clan ninja and a civilian was startlingly obvious to my eyes.

Eyes which, if I recalled correctly, came from an alien goddess whose own people fought in the same way. At this point, I'm almost certain the relationship between ninja and humans was more like the one between humans and neanderthals than anyone cared to admit.

But I digress. Whatever the evolutionary history of this world may have been, that didn't matter to me here and now. What did matter was this: not only was the runner's-high phenomenon still a thing here, it was far more potent than back home. I mean, a good, hard workout could leave a person smiling all day, and it only took half as much effort to get that high.

... If it's actually biological, then that explains so damn much about this world. We're war junkies, all trying to get our next adrenaline and endorphin fix.

I'm not complaining. _Not. At. All._

* * *

I finished my katas and activated my byakugan again. Katsumi and Takeshi were sparring with each other now while our team's jōnin watched and critiqued.

Making my way towards her (and ogling her breasts via better-than-x-ray vision), I asked, "Ma'am, are we going to be taking any missions between now and the exams?"

Her dark green eyes flicked towards me, but her head didn't move. "Just D-Ranks. We don't need anyone getting hurt at the last minute. I spoke with the Raikage last night; they're not sending any other teams to this. Konoha might be neutral to us on paper, but things are still tense even this long after the war. There's a lot of politics going on in the decision to send us there. Your clan spent a lot of its political capital getting Katsumi selection for the chance, you were in the right place at the right time, and Takeshi's already got a reputation as an up-and-coming blademaster and swordsman. In short? Nobody's going to risk this."

"Yeah, that's what I figured," I replied. "Just wanted confirmation."

"Good." Haruka's eyes moved back to watching her other, original students. A moment later, she shouted, "More strength, Katsumi. You need to punch _through_ your target, not _at_ your target." Sure enough, my cousin's next punch landed much more solidly than her previous ones, to Takeshi's visible frustration.

"Ma'am, I—"

"You can call me Haruka, Kenta. I'm not very big on formality."

"Haruka, then. I was wondering... If you knew that the world had a very real and very significant chance of ending within the next three years, what would you do?"

She turned and stared at me — not just a look out of the corner of her eyes, but a full head-turn so that she could look straight at me. "What the hell kind of question is that? The world isn't ending."

"..."

"You're a bit morbid, aren't you? This normal for you, or are you in some sort of funk this morning?" she questioned.

"It was just a thought. I—"

 _ **BOOM!**_

Haruka roared, "Katsumi! No explosions in a friendly spar!"

"Sorry, Sensei."

She turned back to me. "You were saying?"

"Nevermind. It's not important."

Ōtsutsuki Kaguya. The _Scion_ of the Entity known as the God Tree. The potential destroyer of the world. I know my presence changed things, and like the flap of a butterfly's wings, that could that Naruto might lose. We'd all be devoured by the tree.

There was always the possibility that the world wouldn't end like that. Maybe Zetsu was dead, or something. This could be an alternate universe, for all I knew. But to make any assumptions was dangerous. If the world was ending, I'd want to know for sure.

"Alright... if you say so."

"Haruka, do you mind if I leave a little early to go practice my jutsu alone?"

"You don't want another pair of eyes?"

I smirked, though I knew she couldn't see it under my mask. "Unless your willing to let me turn you into a pincushion by letting me throw senbon at your chakra points..."

She shuddered. "No thank you. I've fought a Hyūga before. Having your chakra points shut down fucking sucks."

"True." I'd tried shutting down my own chakra points before; it _hurt_. "But really, I'm fine for now. I'm just rehearsing my existing jutsu arsenal."

She nodded. "Sure. Practice your short-range stuff the most."

I told her I would.

* * *

"Masaru, I'm back," I called as I entered my home. Masaru was the man who the clan considered my father, despite the fact that neither he himself nor I considered him as such. His late wife was my second mother, who died when I was physically four, mentally twenty-five. He had no biological relationship to me and technically held no obligation to "raise" me.

When his wife died, I told him about my past life. I started doing the chores around the house — _all_ the chores — until I could start doing D-ranks all on my own and bring in money. Right now, we basically lived as roommates rather than family.

The fact that I could care for myself and didn't need a _parent_ was a massive relief for him. He'd only been twenty when I was born, meaning that chronologically, he was about six months younger than I was. Without that stress of being a father earlier than he'd ever wanted to be one, he was able to get over his grief much quicker.

Twelve years later, we were good friends. Maybe it was just the mere-exposure effect working on two people who didn't hate each other, but we'd gradually grown closer together.

"I'm in the back!" he shouted. Knowing exactly which room he was referring to, I quickly sped to our workshop. It was a room that we'd expanded thrice, including knocking down nearby walls, to accommodate everything the two of us were working on.

I found him hunched over our refrigerator, hands stained with ink, of all things. The brush in his hands was, with supernatural quickness, drawing the arcane symbols of cloud-style fūinjutsu onto the refrigerator's back, all around the coils. The food and drinks that had been in there were stacked neatly on the workshop bench, save for several beers, whose empty bottles were strewn across the floor haphazardly.

I picked up the beer bottles and threw them in the trash. "Whatever you're doing, hurry it up. I don't want that food going bad."

"Almost done..." he muttered, his hands still copying the symbols from a nearby scroll.

I leaned over to see what he was doing. I'd never had the time to sit down and master fūinjutsu, but I knew enough of the basics to see the general gist of what he was doing. "A reverse fire seal, right?"

"Heat to chakra, my friend. Cold beers and free chakra." Well, not "free" as in "unlimited," but free as in "harvested from a previously inaccessible yet still finite resource." Though now that I think about it, I have no idea if chakra obeys thermodynamics or not.

"How efficient is it?"

"Horrible. Only about 15% efficiency. Better than my last draft. _Bah_ , whatever..."

"Have you considered _light_ to chakra?"

He stopped, literally freezing with his arm suspended in air. "That... Could that work? Don't know how yet, but I don't see why not." He looked at me. "Great idea."

I sat down in my chair, pulled off my mask, and grabbed one of the still-full beers for myself. Old enough to kill, old enough to drink — that was the ninja way. I didn't even _like_ beer, but I was a happy drunk and my thoughts had been all over the place today. Getting _mildly_ drunk in my (technically Masaru's) home was just what I needed.

As I sipped my bitter beverage, I watched Masaru put the final touches on the refrigerator's seals. Then, he clapped his hands, gathered his chakra, and poured it into the seals.

Yes, the blood in the ink manipulated the chakra in a way that was almost hypnotic to watch, but for every single change the seals made, Masaru himself made three more. That was the real reason fūinjutsu was so hard; it was a _jutsu._ There were no hand seals, but there was something external shaping the chakra alongside you; to use a fūinjutsu, you had to compensate for that.

It was a beautiful thing to behold. The seals twisted and shrank, growing in complexity all the while. Then, with the visible equivalent of a click, the jutsu snapped into place. "That never gets old."

Masaru smirked. "I live to entertain. Can you check it over for me?"

I did, using one of my self-invented jutsu to narrow my byakugan's field of vision in exchange for greater clarity. "You have some turbulence around the seven o'clock T-junction. It's increasing the resistance in the counterclockwise flow."

He blew a strand of his pale blond hair out of his eyes. If he'd been a redhead, I'd have wondered if he were an Uzumaki. "That's where I thought it would be. Good to see I was right. No idea how to fix it yet, but at least... Wait, turbulent how? Vortices or oscillations?"

"The former. It's spinning."

He nodded his head once. "That makes sense. Alright, maybe if I..." he trailed off.

Seeing a need to speak before he got too involved in his seal crafting, I asked, "Hey, do you mind if I work on my guns? Will the noise bother you?"

"Nah, go ahead," he replied without looking at me.

"Cool." I moved to my side of the workshop, snagging my beer along the way and downing a few gulps. Unlike Masaru's side (which was covered in books, scrolls, ink, and scorch marks), my much larger section was full of metalworking tools, metal, woods, rubber, and an assortment of other mechanical bits and bobs. Any space not filled with tools was filled with the products of those tools.

Bows, crossbows, senbon launchers, kunai launchers, shoulder-mounted railguns, tripod-mounted railguns, actual _gun_ guns (just a few prototypes, and they still tended to explode), thermite, sugar rockets, and puppet parts designed to carry all of the above. Almost every single thing here was designed to either be triggered by my lightning chakra, or be augmented by it in some way.

My pride and joys, among all of my creations and purchases, were my railguns. Once I'd engineered lightning chakra-compatible ones, the true power of my byakugan was unleashed. While there was no fucking way I could engineer something to the same standards as the U.S. Military, using the ninja bullshit that is chakra and seals, Masaru and I had created a weapon that could put a metal slug through someone's brain at ten miles.

Oh, and that? That's the _basic_ one.

The massive one shoots beyond my byakugan's range. That jutsu I mentioned earlier, the one that let me sacrifice field of view for clarity? I could also sacrifice field of view for _range._ Tunnel vision for greater clarity at a distance. I could extend my sight to up to thirty miles — a view so long that I had to _look through the Earth itself_ to see my target. Targets that far away were equivalently _five hundred feet_ underground.

The slug from the big cannon overshot even that enhancement of my vision.

I couldn't carry the damn thing, not even with ninja strength. The only way to move it was with storage seals, and those took an annoyingly large amount of chakra to seal the mega cannon away. But _firing_ it? That took a surprisingly small amount of chakra for what it was — still huge, but not _that_ huge. Big and flashy jutsu have a ridiculous amount of energy waste; for a simple Uchiha clan fireball, how much of the giant flame actually _hit_ the target? Twenty, maybe thirty percent? And that's a _genin_ level jutsu. What's more, the sheer size of it means that the destructive energy is hardly concentrated.

A gun is so much more efficient, even when Newton demanded that half the energy was lost in simple recoil. My theory was that the more bullshit a jutsu involves — the more it screws physics in the ass — the more chakra it takes, and that the actual observed energy requirements don't factor into it all that much. I mean, why else would one shot of my mega cannon take only as much chakra as holding the rasengan for five seconds?

Yes, I knew the rasengan. Anime Jiraiya taught it so well.

Anyway, back to my original point: my section of the workshop was an utter mess... Thankfully, I had über-hax eyes to see through all the clutter. Burning a little extra chakra for my other bloodline, I sped up to about 4x normal rather than my usual 3x. An extra 33% more time to work on something was no laughing matter. I had guns to fix, ammo to make, and a puppet to upgrade.

I'd already burned through 1/5 of the time I had pre-exams just training with Haruka's team; I _needed_ to get my latest round of projects battle-ready as soon as possible. Flicking out a thread of chakra, I snagged a wrench and pulled it to my hand. Then I got to work.

* * *

Chakra amplified everything.

No better place is this more evident than in the hospital. If you just so happen to compare patient charts, you'll notice that for similar injuries, ninja have an estimated recovery time a quarter of what a civilian would have, or better. Wounds close, flesh regenerates, cells repair — a person's chakra bends reality in subtle ways to keep them alive, healthy, and happy, and that's before you account for healing jutsu. But chakra, affected both by psychology and genetics as it is, also evolved to help its wielders in other ways.

For instance, it inspired physical changes in the body. Ninja were tougher in ways that couldn't be accounted for by simply working out. Their bones grow in slightly different shapes and were far denser, their muscles were more powerful pound for pound, and their organs all had subtle adjustments. I knew some of that wasn't entirely genetic, because even civilian-born ninja had these changes, the degree of which almost exactly corresponds to the age they'd unlocked their chakra. (By that metric, it made sense that I had the most pronounced changes of anyone I'd ever seen).

And if you needed more obvious proof... let's just say it's not wise to get into a literal dick-measuring contest with a shinobi. Sex is a big part of life, and chakra amplifies life itself.

The reason I bring this up is because I'm making one last "drop-off" at the hospital's fertility clinic before the start of the exams, doing my duty as a breeding stud. I have mixed feelings about it.

The pros:

I'm a fucking, _breeding stud._ I get paid to jerk off. I have an extremely sexy body (in comparison to my old life) with a ten-inch cock that can produce a huge amount of spunk. I'll have a shit-ton of kids (fifteen and counting so far, 8 for whom the byakugan bred true). I'll be a branch clan head one day. It's almost like something out of an erotic novel.

And the cons:

I'm a breeding stud, a mere tool to be used. The process is extremely clinical. Being a clan kid means I'm already rich, so the pay doesn't actually mean all that much. I have no choice to opt out of breeding the byakugan or leading the new branch (not that I would opt out; merely the fact that I lack the choice annoys me). And worst of all... I'm only slightly above average-sized among ninja my stature.

You'd think being able to shoot lightning from the fingertips would be enough for a guy, but no. Reality sucks, even in a porn-friendly world.

One round of self-pleasure later, I handed the large, capped vial full of semen to the nurse, who signed off on my log and sent me on my way. I knew that my pay would show up in my bank account by the end of the week, so the entire interaction went by with little more than a "Hello again," between the two of us.

As I was leaving the hospital, I couldn't help but notice who's coming in: Killer Bee. I'd never met the man, but there were only two people in this village who had chakra that shined like a star — and the other was a woman. Chakra like his was unmistakable.

When people compared someone to a bijū in terms of strength, they really meant that the person simply had a lot of chakra. Even the biggest chakra powerhouses were still human, with quantities of chakra that were comprehensible.

The star of chakra inside Killer Bee's seal was not comprehensible. Imagine the sky at night, an infinity so vast that your mind simply has no frame of reference, one that it instead sees as a massive but smooth dome upon which the star-dots are painted. The sky's so massive that the only way to understand it is to imagine it closer and smaller than it really is.

That was what staring at the eight-tails' chakra was like.

I turned my attention away from the man and towards the situation. Bee was in the hospital, and he was hurt. A broken leg, I think. Between his jinchūriki healing and the medic ninja magic, he'll be back out in less than an hour, I'm sure. Hell, they hadn't even touched him yet, and I could see, in real time, his body already trying to fix itself.

I was curious as to how he got it, though. Broken bones were extremely uncommon for ninja outside of fights — we're naturally tougher and better able to escape dangerous situations. Leg breaks were even rarer, as chakra can protect from fall damage. Bee didn't look to roughed up other than his leg, so maybe it _was_ an accident.

I don't know. I didn't ask.

I walked right past him. I nodded hello. He casually nodded back. We didn't speak at all. And why would we? We've never officially met.

Killer Bee can wait. I've got a mission to prepare for.


	3. 3 Howling Wind

_A/N: Chapter uploads are Wednesday and Saturday until further notice._

* * *

It was the week before our trip to Konoha, and the village was already getting ready. Consider that while the military aspects of the village had a lot to gain, so too did the civilian economy. Lightning Merchants were already beginning their journeys to Konoha, bringing along with them the Cloud Shinobi they'd hired as guards. Then came tourists and the families of wealthy merchants.

What we were going to was not merely an exam, but the economic equivalent of the Olympic games — though for business and war instead of sport.

Even though the final exams were still a month and a half away, we ninja traveled so much faster than the civilians that they had to leave _now._ Even with horses and sailboats, a land and sea-based journey with squishy merchants took forever. This was the first Konoha Chūnin exams that Kumo would be attending in decades; everyone was anxious to get there quickly for the potential business and trade deals.

Seeing the village explode into activity made me anxious. _I_ was supposed to be a ringer. _I_ was supposed to show off the power of Hidden Cloud (and help my teammates as well, so we could get every opportunity). I was praying the exams were what I remembered them to be, because if they weren't, this was going to be a very difficult task and there was a lot riding on me succeeding.

The mission scroll I'd received outlined the failure condition: failing to have at least one member of the team fight in the third round of the examination. The punishment for failure was listed simply as "Standard rank-appropriate mission-failure punishment, plus additions as the circumstances dictate." The first half of that was nothing to scoff at, but I could deal with that sort of punishment — docked pay, a black mark on my record, and the like. The second half, however, was basically authorization for the Raikage to punish me however he damn well pleased.

When we or one of our other allies hosted a chūnin exam, it was a big deal but it wasn't mission-critical. There was already frequent economic contact between the two nations, and our reputations within each other's borders are well-established. However, in Konohagakure, there was an entire generation of merchants, businessmen, and potential clients that had never personally seen us fight, nor had directly traded with Lightning's merchants.

Then, consider the fact that a single jōnin could _easily_ make ten to fifteen _million_ ryō over their whole career, possibly even more depending on the situation, and some of the most powerful ninja in the village can earn twenty times that in their careers. Now consider that we have about 1,300 active and recently-retired combat ninja in Kumogakure proper, plus clans in other neighboring cities that swore their loyalty to the Raikage in order to use Cloud's resources. Throughout the Land of Lightning, Kumo commanded a force of roughly 2,000 ninja. The annual cost of supporting a ninja force that big was somewhere around 1.5 _billion_ ryō a year. Even a one percent increase in missions was a _massive_ amount of money.

We are soldiers for hire. We are in the business of war. Even if they frequently are the same thing, our goal is not to win but to profit.

And right now, I'm at the center of it all.

No pressure.

* * *

"Do it faster next time!" Haruka yelled.

I nodded ever so slightly, acknowledging her advice, as I slid back into my stance. Across from me, Takeshi did the same. In his hands, he gripped his blunted wakizashi and katana, wielding both with impressive skill. He had a nasty habit of sprouting short-lived cloud-clone arms to slash at me with their duplicated blades. Even though they were merely training versions of the real things, they were still quite annoying.

In my hands, I wielded a mace. While it was capped in a thick layer of rubber and wasn't electrified like my melee weapon usually was, it was still a heavy tool in the hands of someone with bloodline-augmented strength. The Kaminyojin clan was famous for their maces, which complemented our prodigious strength and speed quite well.

But, despite me wielding my clan's signature weapon, despite me having a higher base speed, and despite me having a greater reach due to my significantly larger size, Takeshi was _still_ kicking my ass. Give me a few kunai and a little range, and I'll have him literally pinned to the ground. But up close and personal like this? Takeshi was king.

And by god, it was fun.

I was fighting with only my half-mask today, which only covered my eyes in a solid piece of metal and left my mouth and nose exposed. I knew that Takeshi could see me grinning like a loon just as easily as I could see his own smile.

If I had to guess, his expression was more of an "I'm beating a clan kid with two bloodlines" smile than an "I'm merely having fun fighting" smile like my own. Even though I can see how one's thoughts affect their brain's chakra and blood flow like a living MRI machine, I couldn't actually read minds.

With a grunt, I swung my mace down, attempting to bash his shoulder. He blocked my mace with his wakizashi, simply giving it just enough of a nudge to the side that I missed entirely. I moved to strike again, but he was already counter-attacking from my previous blow with the katana. His blade slashed cleanly across my bare chest. Though my skin was unharmed by the blunted training weapon, I mentally acquiesced the round's point to him.

"You still need to work on your speed," Haruka reiterated to me as the two of us disengaged. "You're slow for a Kaminyojin."

"Yes, Haruka. I know." I could have gone faster, but not without burning a significant amount of chakra. That wasn't the point of this spar. _This_ was to make sure I wouldn't die horribly if I got caught in a melee fight with low chakra by training my base, unaugmented speed. Well, as unaugmented as a Kaminyojin could get.

What also set it apart from a real fight was that I wasn't using a defensive layer of chakra. Like a lesser version of what the Raikage did when he cloaked himself in lightning chakra, my clan's hybrid chakra could form a defensive barrier around our skin.

Of course, the flip-side of running lightning chakra through your skin was that it heated up, so much so that wearing a top was uncomfortably hot, even in these mountains. Kaminyojin men often went completely topless (like I did) or wore _only_ the flak jackets, and women went with simple bras, wearing the flak jackets only occasionally. Was it sexy as hell? Yes. Was it practical? Well, not necessarily, but it _was_ comfortable. And with how far away I usually was from the battle, it didn't matter all that much to me.

Even up at melee range, wearing a flack-jacket didn't offer that much protection, especially against swordsmen like Takeshi, who could use chakra to make their swords sharp enough to puncture through, and mace wielders like the Kaminyojin, who could bash right through it. Thus, I chose to utterly forego it.

Rubbing the spot where his blunted blade grazed me (which happened to have a tattoo of the constellation Ares, which didn't exist in this world), I said to Takeshi, "One inch lower and you would have slipped perfectly between my ribs."

"Hmm..." He nodded, then tapped the tip of his blade to the spot I'd indicated on my chest, eyeing how it related to the underlying musculature and where it was compared to my nipples. Then he gave the blade a few swings, hitting the same spot every single time. Even now, it was a bit weird watching him silently rehearse a killing strike.

Then again, he did everything silently. That was just Takeshi. He simply made himself understood with action.

"If you two are ready," Haruka interjected, "get into your stances and start again."

Takeshi bobbed his head. I spoke for the both of us, "Yes, Sensei."

* * *

We were called to the Raikage's office the night before we of team Haruka were scheduled to depart for Konohagakure. But, despite immediately following the chūnin sent to fetch us, we were forced to wait a bit outside the Raikage's office. While the secretary _told_ us that he was in the middle of an important meeting that had just run a little long, I could see the truth: Lord Ay was bench pressing the weights in the corner of his office.

...I don't think he was expecting us to get there nearly as fast as we did.

I took the opportunity to look around. If there was one thing I loved about my mask, it was that it hid my bulging veins when I snooped. Shifting my focus to the desk, I browsed the documents on his desk and in his drawers. Economic reports, military reports, secret intelligence (whoops, I'll ignore that), jutsu research results, a letter from Masaru detailing the prototype light-to-chakra seal he'd started developing, and much more filled every available space in and on the desk.

It was just a wee bit terrifying how much of a living security leak I was. People knew that I could see through walls. People knew I could read closed books. People knew I could see extreme ranges. Very few knew all three things. Only two people fully knew how I perceived the world (and one of them was now dead), and only they could have guessed just how powerful my sight was. And **_nobody_ **knew that I could read anything at almost any distance through basically any chakraless obstruction.

The Kaminyojin clan served as a deterrent to bloodline users coming into the Land of Lightning unless they already lived here. No byakugan user would ever come here (again), due to the risk of their precious eyes falling into the wrong hands. Maybe the Raikage of the past and present had decided that it wasn't worth the expense of installing measures against dōjutsu with penetrative vision, or maybe they simply hadn't thought of it, but either way, the one thing that _might_ have clouded my vision wasn't here.

A chakra haze.

My eyes saw the world as a 3D projection of a 4D world, rather than as a 2D projection of a 3D world as regular eyes saw it. Imagine drawing a box on a piece of paper, then drawing something inside that box. A 2D creature would see the edge of the box, but not the contents; you can only see the contents because you're looking "down" on that 2D world, a direction that does not exist for the 2D Flatlander. The same applies to me. You see a 3D box — say, a closed safe — but I can look "down" on it and see all the items inside it, from every single angle at the same time. I saw inside books, I saw inside people, I saw inside everything. Four walls, a floor, and a ceiling might have been enough to stop normal people, but to stop me, you'd have to saturate every possible location with moderate amounts of chakra.

It wouldn't take much chakra to obscure my vision to the extent that I couldn't read. Even soaking the important documents in chakra would have been enough. But nobody thought to do that. I saw the world in such a weird way that the method for blocking my vision was utterly unintuitive.

My attention was pulled away by the secretary entering the Raikage's office and informing him that we were here. Lord Ay racked his weights and stood up. "Send them in," I read on his lips. He stood, wiped his brow, slipped on his Kage's robe, and flopped down onto the couch behind his desk, as if trying to play off the fact that he'd kept us waiting. If I hadn't seen him through the walls and had only seen him as he was now upon entering the room, I probably would have thought he looked rather cool.

As it was, I had to stifle a laugh.

"Team Haruka," he greeted. "I trust you and Kaminyojin Kenta have gotten along well?"

"Yes, Lord Ay," my jōnin sensei replied. "He is a welcome addition to the team."

"Good. I also trust that you are all fully aware of the nature of his mission?"

"We are," Haruka replied.

"Again, good," Ay said. One of his legs, which had been resting atop the other, moved so that both of his feet were flat on the floor. "Then let me re-emphasize what the core of Kenta's mission is: displaying the power of Kumogakure to the world, and to the Land of Fire. To that end, while he may be a ringer, if Kaminyojin Katsumi or Lee Takeshi should have the opportunity to advance, it is Kenta's duty to help you in any way possible. For you two, however, this is merely the chūnin exams. Understood?"

"Yes, Sir," we replied in unison.

"That said, you are all fine shinobi. I expect you to all pass on your own strength." Ay concluded by giving us each a confident look.

"Thank you, Sir." Of the three of us, Katsumi bore the praise most visibly, her cheerfully expression wide and bright. Under his mask, however, Takeshi was also smiling.

"Now, to help facilitate your success, I've had a dossier of Konoha's exam prepared for you, including the likely structure of the examination and a summary of the Leaf teams registered to take the test. The names themselves are public knowledge, but the rest is not.

"Kenta, as this is your mission, I am giving this information to you alone. You may share it with your teammates if you so desire, but consider this: the chūnin exams are a test of team and individual skill, not of the strength of our spy network. If you don't share this, you will be keeping with the spirit of the exam, but if you do, your odds of success increase. In any other circumstance, I'd order you to read it. Now, however, the choice is yours — and your team's."

He handed me a packet of papers. The first few pages were on the exam itself, the rest was on the other ninja. Even at a glance, I could tell that this was valuable intelligence. "Thank you, sir. We won't make this decision lightly."

"As you should. Do inform me of your ultimate choice."

"Yes, sir."

* * *

There were a lot of papers to go through in the information packet I'd been given. 87 Leaf, 30 Sand, 21 Rain, 6 Grass, 6 Waterfall, and 3 Sound ninja were fighting in these exams. Every report had public knowledge, trusted espionage, and unconfirmed speculation, clearly labeled as such. For some, like Naruto Uzumaki himself, the information was sparse. For others, like Gaara of the Sand, information was more widely available due to his infamy.

In every case, I'd poured through the data, especially that of the Konoha Rookie 12. And although I told nobody, everything I read left me feeling more and more confident that this was a decently close-to-canon timeline. My mere existence hadn't stepped on too many butterflies just yet, I don't think.

"The information is good," I told my teammates after having processed said information. "The question is, how much of it do you want? I'm willing to tell you everything, or at least a summarized version of it."

The two of them looked at each other, had a silent conversation, and then turned to me. Speaking for the both of them, Katsumi replied, "Just give us a vague hint for each stage of the exam and a list of people to avoid."

"I'll need to get back to you on that list, but for now... Alright. In stage one, cheat. Be stealthy. Stage two... only fifty percent can pass, but we can narrow that even further to our advantage. Also, bring survival gear. Stage three is the usual tournament. One-on-one this time," I supplied.

Takeshi grunted while Katsumi gave me a thumbs-up. "Cool. We can work with that."

"Good, now give me a few minutes."

True to my word, I had a list of the dangerous ninja a few minutes later. It would have been really fucking nice to have a neural net AI to help me compare all these values, but lacking that, I'd mostly gone with my gut.

"In no particular order... Gaara, Kankurō, and Temari — Suna, team Baki. They're the Kazekage's children. Kagari, Mubi, Oboro — Ame, team Oboro. Shigure of team Shigure, also Ame. Hōki of team Bumi, from Taki. Lee Rock and Hyūga Neji — Konoha, team Gai. Aburame Shino and Hyūga Hinata — Konoha, team Kurenai. Uchiha Sasuke of team Kakashi, Konoha. Nara Shikamaru of team Asuma, Konoha. And finally, Kinuta Dosu of team Dosu, Oto."

I double checked to make sure I hadn't forgotten anyone that was dangerous to us. The only reason I included Hinata was that I didn't want us hurting her. I admit, it was a purely selfish, fanboy motive. I also didn't include Naruto because, based on this information alone, he wasn't spectacular, and if my teammates looked at it, they might get suspicious about my canon knowledge (what little of it I hadn't forgotten yet).

"Those Suna and Ame teams all have significant body counts while practically everyone else on that list is a bloodline wielder, comes from a significant clan, has a powerful teacher, or some combination of the above. Most of them are also significant wildcards. I'll point them all out to you when we get there."

"Err... maybe a little more information?" Katsumi requested.

Takeshi, however, shook his head. "That was enough for me." He stood from his seat, pushed in his chair, and started walking away. "Thank you," he called over his shoulder.

Katsumi and I stared at him as he walked away. "Did he just say _two complete sentences?_ " My teammate asked.

"I'm just as surprised as you..." I muttered back. Then, switching both my train of thought and my dialect to the faster version, I began, "Alright, here are the highlights. Gaara of the Sand is, as his epitaph suggests, a sand user who's extremely lethal at short range..."

* * *

The run from Kumo to Konoha takes five days at Kumo's Standard Marching Pace. Yes, that was a real, officially designated speed. We were expected to be able to maintain that speed for a whole day of running, accounting for six ten-minute breaks and an hour for lunch. Despite the fact that it was slightly above highway speeds, it wasn't actually all that hard of a pace for a ninja to maintain. In short, chakra-assisted bursts, some ninja had clocked over the speed of sound — eighty miles an hour was a snail's pace in comparison, but it was the fastest speed that would leave a ninja combat-worthy regardless of how long they'd been running.

We did it in three days. Three days ending in pleasantly heavy breathing and wide, runner's-high induced smiles. As far as training went, it was fairly relaxing as, rather than running around Kumo's borders or countless laps on the indoor tracks, we got to a whole new landscape, including the transition from stormy, barren mountains to lush mega-forests.

To me, the transition was even more interesting. All my life, I'd thought my byakugan stained the world slightly yellowish in color. That was not the case, for as the world grew more forested, the tint transitioned through orange, to red. Almost simultaneously, the temperature rose in perfect time with the color change while the ever-present static electricity that clung to Kumo faded. I realized then what it was: the Land of Lightning was soaked in lightning chakra, while the Land of Fire was soaked in, you guessed it, fire chakra. It was a weak, thin film — there probably wasn't enough fire chakra in a cubic mile to perform a single fireball jutsu, but the mere presence of it still affected the very world around us.

I wondered... was the chakra from the plethora fire-using ninja, did the chakra _make_ the ninja into fire-users, or it was a chicken-and-the-egg question of one causing the other? And was this nature chakra or was it something else entirely? Definitely food for thought.

I do apologize, though. I tended to get lost in my own thoughts from time to time as I contemplated this strange, beautiful world. I had so many questions, yet no frame of reference to answer them. How much can I even trust that knowledge I was reborn with? What I know seems to hold true, but then I run into situations like this, with the change in the ambient chakra, and I'm left scratching my head again.

Anyway, the three-day trip...

It was, as I said, quite fun. I'd loved running in my past life, and I love it even more now. The wind in my hair, the sun beaming down on my bare chest, the happy drumbeat of my heart in my chest, the gorgeous landscape passing by my superb vision — it was _exquisite_.

Like my teammates, I was traveling light. That was a relative term, however, as I was carrying with me almost my entire functional arsenal, several hundred pieces of equipment and corresponding ammunition, sealed within scrolls and those nested in even more scrolls. On my back, I carried my bow and quiver of iron arrows. On my hip, I had a scroll of tools I might need to access quickly in a fight. In the sealing tattoo on my chest, rather than my DAKKA puppet, I had a massive scroll with just about everything else, from incidentals and toiletries to railguns and the DAKKA itself. That scroll was a massive, sixty-pound hunk of paper and ink containing literal tons of weaponry. And all of that was reduced to the size and weight of the ink under my skin.

Takeshi, Katsumi, and Haruka were similarly light, only with scrolls strapped to them instead of inside tattooed seals. Takeshi had his swords, the real ones this time, strapped to his hips; Katsumi wore spiked gauntlets charged with her explosive chakra, making her hands extremely deadly; and Haruka wore a pair of knuckle dusters, which complimented her taijutsu style just fine.

Each of us was also wearing our usual attire. Haruka wore the standard Kumo jōnin attire; Takeshi wore nearly the same, save for using a genin's flak-jacket instead, and had his usual oni mask on his face; Katsumi wore her black pants and had her chest bare save for the bindings that pressed her developing boobs flat; and I wore nothing on my upper body save for my archer's gloves emblazoned with Kumo's insignia, my mask, and a single silver earring on my right ear.

Unlike normal, I wore a more ornate mask; it was still polished metal, but that's where the similarities to my other masks ended. It was shaped like a dragon's face, but with four mouthparts shaped in an X. The eyes of the mask were glass hemispheres painted with fluorescent orange nail polish, which made them look like glowing dragon's eyes. Having been made by me in homage to a character from my past life, it was subject to the same distortion effect that plagued my speech, writing, and drawing. Wearing the mask only made the effect worse, to the point that people would go out of their way to avoid looking at it a second time, often looking at my feet instead. And, in a world where bowing was a sign of both respect and submission, subtly forcing people to bow gave me an edge.

It was perfect for the occasion. Lord Ay wanted me to show off my power, and by extension, the power of Kumogakure. Any advantage I could get would be useful.

Ready or not, Konoha, here I come.


	4. 4 Pounding Rain

Konoha reminded me of home. Not Kumo — that's always felt more like "the place where I am currently sleeping" than "home." No, I'm talking about my Earth. I grew up in Northern Georgia, southern Tennessee, and southern South Carolina. All of it was heavily forested hills. Unless you were at the top of a mountain, you could rarely see more than a few hundred feet in any direction as trees and buildings would block your view. Even the sky seemed smaller.

In contrast to my old world, Kumogakure made me slightly agoraphobic, emphasis on _slightly_. It didn't really bother me, so much as it unsettled me and made me feel like I was always far from home. My eyes only made the feeling worse, as I kept them on _all_ the time.

And in contrast to Kumo, Konoha had trees by the millions, and they had chakra in them. All plants did, but only here did the implications of that truly stand out. I couldn't see nearly as far as before. The trees casted shadows, for lack of a better word, that degraded my vision of what lay directly behind them. It wouldn't stop me from identifying someone at great range, but it would stop me from reading any text that wasn't directly in line-of-sight for mundane vision. But, at the same time, it was the closest emulation my byakugan-sight would have to my old home's visual limitations. And when I deactivated them and took off my mask... well, I might as well have been home.

That was, if you discount the fact that:

A) I had lived in the middle of the 21st century rather than the 14th century with randomly supplied alien tech,

B) I'd lived in a time of economic prosperity that would have put the elemental nations to shame, and lived in rich cities on top of that,

C) I had lived in the United States instead of pseudo-Asia,

D) I'd lived in cities designed for cars rather than pedestrians and horse-and-buggies, and

E) none of the cities I'd lived in were military dictatorships.

So, excluding those and the myriad of implications that those five facts presented, it was like home. In other words, only at the most superficial level was Konoha anything like home, yet it was more like home than Kumo.

It was also too damn hot. Seriously. In this life and the last, I'd always been a rather warm-bodied individual that couldn't stand the heat (in the most literal of senses). Give me rain, snow, and ice any day, but nonstop sunshine? _Blech_. It was fine when I was running and had the wind to cool me, but here, having just entered the city? I was dying.

The four of us were led by a special jōnin to the Hokage's tower, though at a slow, easy pace that gave us time to look around. Unlike Kumo, there were no "shinobi" and "civilian" districts; rather, everything was evenly mixed together.

And speaking of _mixing_ , I could see a surprising number of people actively having sex. Oh, I saw that all the time in every city, so I was neither shocked nor bothered, but this many at this time of day? Upon closer inspection, I saw that most of those couplings were inside buildings that were obviously brothels. The number of brothels surprised me as well. It was almost as if...

Oh, I get it. Konoha is the Amsterdam of the Ninja world. If, you know, the Netherlands allowed slavery and human trafficking so long as it was kept out of sight. Hey, I never said this world was perfect, or anything even approaching perfect. I just don't give a shit about it.

The Hokage's tower protruded out of the top of the Ninja Academy, standing out by virtue of the bright red color and the kanji for _fire_ boldly written on it. We leapt onto the Academy roof, went around to the side that wasn't visible from the street, and were lead through a doorway on the middle floor. Two flights of stairs later, the special jōnin brought us into the Hokage's office. It was just like the Raikage's office, except smaller, lacking in gym weights, crammed full of paperwork, and utterly lacking in broken walls and window.

So, in other words, it wasn't anything like the Raikage's office at all.

Also, unlike the Raikage's office, the drawers of the desk and filing cabinets were protected against the byakugan — only enough that I couldn't _read_ the contents of the drawer, but I could see that they were filled. I could also see and recognize a particular book in his drawer, one that I also had, kept safely stored within my seals.

Trust me, Jiraiya's books _are not trash_. For "porn with plot," they had a surprisingly good plot with well-written characters. They were just a bit... _vanilla_ , for my tastes. Luxury, high-quality vanilla, but vanilla all the same. Of course, that's also probably why those books were so popular.

We entered the office; the Hokage was sitting there, waiting for us. Despite his advanced age, he was still in remarkably good shape with potent, well-controlled chakra flowing through his veins. Not a single wasted wisp of energy leaked into the air around him. Yet it wasn't suppressed — merely contained.

When he spoke, however, the chakra came out in his voice. It was just a drop, so little that he'd regenerate it by the time he took a breath for the next sentence, but it laced his very words. Every ninja did it. We all laced every single action we took with our chakra, the very essence of our mind, body, and soul, as we enforced our wills upon reality. For a man like Sarutobi, the sheer control he had over himself, and his chakra by extension, meant that even trace amounts he released had significant impacts. I could literally _see_ the effect his chakra had on my own mind and the minds of my allies, as minuscule as it was.

In short, when he spoke, lesser men had no choice but to listen, even if he wasn't saying anything all that important. To others, especially those unaware of its effect, it made him seem more regal and profound. In contrast to my own kage's voice, which merely metaphorically muscled up to you and made his words seem powerful, the Hokage's voice slithered through my ears and into my brain.

I hated it. I _despised_ it. I despised even more that there was nothing any of us could do about it, not even him. It was an entirely unconscious act.

"Ah, Kumogakure's team Haruka. I am pleased that you could make it," he said, though my read on his chakra and physiology indicated that he was a bit less pleased than his tone would have suggested. I can't read minds, but I can read micro-expressions, heart rate, breathing, and chakra flow. Together, those are almost as good as the real thing. Relations between Kumo and Konoha were still tense, thanks in no small part to what my second mother had done; it was no surprise, then, that Lord Sarutobi was secretly less-than-pleased with our presence in his village. "I trust your trip was uneventful?"

"It was quite pleasant, Lord Sarutobi," Haruka answered for us, though I and my peers silently nodded along. "There were no issues."

"Good, good." He produced an envelope containing a pair of keys and a short letter, which I read before Haruka could even grasp it. It was simply a notice of which room we'd be staying at in the Amber Jewel Hotel, plus general instructions regarding the test itself and the use of training grounds.

The building itself was in my range, so I also took a quick look there. It appeared quite fancy, deserving of its name. There were Suna and Ame ninja there already, so I assumed that's where they're keeping all the foreign contestants. I found our rooms easily enough; two, two-bed bedrooms that sat across the hall from one another.

By the time I'd found them, the Hokage was explaining exactly what I had seen. I turned my full attention back to the Hokage.

He was looking each of us over, but I noticed how his eyes skipped over the mask I wore, how he lingered on me the least of all. I counted that as a win in my books. But, in contrast, his eyes lingered the longest on Katsumi, and on the clan insignia she had tattooed on her upper chest. Despite her being a good-looking girl and him being a known pervert, there was no lust that I could spot within him. Perhaps, I think, what he was feeling was closer to anger and distrust.

Right. She was a Kaminyojin woman. My mother, among other clan women, had personally wronged the Hidden Leaf at the behest of their clan leader; there was no indication that Katsumi wouldn't do exactly the same thing. I'll have to keep an eye on her and those around her, then.

* * *

The four of us were walking out of the Hokage's tower when Katsumi finally shuddered. "The Hokage's scary."

"He's not called the _God of the Shinobi_ for nothing," Haruka remarked. "He may be old, but he could still give even Lord Ay a run for his money."

"Katsumi, he was looking at you, specifically, out of all of us," I warned. "The tattoo of our clan symbol, to be specific."

She bent her head down, pressing her chin to her chest so that she could catch the barest glimpse of our clan insignia. "Oh."

"Yeah. That's probably not the best thing to be displaying around here," I added, having switched to our clan dialect. "But my Lady, I must insist that you not go _anywhere_ alone, and limit your interactions with Leaf Ninja as much as possible."

"I can take care of myself," she huffed. "And what's with the _my Lady_ thing?"

"My Lady, I'm speaking to you as a subordinate member of the Kaminyojin clan. Not as your friend, not as your teammate, but as your loyal family member," I answered.

She swallowed. I think she just realized how serious I was taking it. To drive the point home, I added, still speaking in the clan dialect, "We cannot even give the Leaf a chance to tarnish your reputation with even the _suggestion_ that your conduct was less than perfect, much less give them the chance to actually hurt you."

Takeshi nodded along, while our Sensei added, "He does raise a good point, Katsumi." Her eyes swept back and forth, watching those whom we passed by. A lot of Konoha shinobi gave us long looks, and not all of them were friendly. "I think our relationship is better on paper than in reality."

"Sabotage?" Takeshi questioned.

Our teacher shook her head. "Unlikely. Konoha benefits from us being here almost as much as we do, if not more. They outnumber us in the exams thirty to one and have a lot of chances to force us out of the final round. If they can eliminate us fairly through the exams, to the point where we have no legitimate argument against them, they can use that as bragging rights to benefit the village. Hell, even if you three do make it to the end, or even win, they can still hypothetically pull merchants and business away from Kumo if they give a good enough of a showing. But if they cheat, we and the other villages can destroy their reputation."

Politics. Sometimes, we fight more with words, money, and reputation than we do with actual blades. I hate it; I'd love to be in the middle of a real fight, or just sitting back and watching the world metaphorically burn, but right now, that wasn't an option for me. Or, for that matter, anyone else on the team.

I wasn't an idiot. I _knew_ the Kaminyojin clan had something on Haruka that would make or break her depending on what happens to Katsumi. I also strongly suspected that Takeshi and my clan's heir were only as close as they were because Takeshi was the "genius" of their year. Hell, I'm probably on her team because I'm the Kaminyojin's answer to Itachi Uchiha, minus the bloodthirsty clan-killing part.

(Actually, I think my own meteoric rise through the ranks stalled just shortly after the Uchiha Massacre. I've been a special chūnin — now a regular genin — for a long time now.)

In short, all four of us are standing here in Konoha at this moment for one reason: politics. "I just want to be done with this already," I said, both in response to the current conversation and my own train of supernaturally accelerated thoughts.

On my left, Katsumi snorted mirthfully. "I know that feeling. I just want to be a chūnin already, not dealing with stupid village stuff!"

By now, we were in sight of the Amber Jewel Hotel. Changing the subject, I said to my team, "Why don't you three get unpacked and settled into our room. I'm going to go scout out the training fields." What went unsaid but not unheard was that I was planning on scouting out the competition and the village itself.

"That sounds like a good idea," Haruka remarked. She gave me a little shooing motion. "Go ahead. We'll meet up with you later. I'm sure you can find us. Dinner time?"

"Yeah. That works." I turned, giving them a wave as I did so. "Later."

With a burst of chakra, I leaped upwards onto the roof of a nearby building and started running. There was a certain trio with a jinchūriki that I was interested in meeting.

* * *

It was not _Gaara's_ will leaking out into the world, but Shukaku's. It was a faint, nearly invisible miasma that didn't extend far from Gaara's body. Unlike the other two jinchūriki I'd seen, the ichibi's chakra flowed fairly evenly through his chakra system, much more a liquid than a solid mass, and when it came into contact with Gaara's skin, an infinitesimally small amount of Shukaku's chakra boiled off and became the gas-like substance surrounding him. That chakra sank into the ground, grinding the very stone into sand, while also soaking into the gourd of sand on his back. In short, with every beat of Gaara's heart, Shukaku was preparing their weapon and their battlefield.

It was, I admit, eerily fascinating to watch. A normal shinobi would notice that sort of drain, but not Gaara. I could also understand why people felt so ill-at-ease with Gaara around; the chakra was hostile, lashing out at Gaara's siblings whenever they got too close. I doubt they could even consciously feel an amount that small, but their own chakra was definitely reacting to it. It was a silent battle of souls, and I don't think they were winning.

Moving a good bit closer, for the densely populated and forested village cast even more chakra shadows than the forest alone, I hopped into the trees and settled in place. My attention turned to the fan on Temari's back and the puppet on Kankurō's. Aside from being chakra conductive, and therefore nearly transparent to chakra, the fan was just a fan. The puppet, on the other hand, was far more interesting.

Geared mechanisms filled every available space, save for thin tubes to allow chakra to flow to the more complex mechanisms deeper inside. Unlike my DAKKA puppet, Kankurō's was definitely more focused on melee-ranged combat, as it was full of blades and joint reinforcements rather than my puppet's guns and rigid skeleton. Also unlike my puppet, which could use servos powered by my electric chakra, his was controlled entirely through strings. I don't know how that compares to mine in terms of controllability; I can use the voltage from each of my fingers as a sort of multi-bit input, but he can freely manipulate every single part without concern for electronics.

That warranted experimentation. I'm practically reinventing the art of puppetry here without external aid, so taking design advice from a practiced Suna puppet master might be a worthwhile idea.

"In the trees." Gaara stopped and stared directly at me, despite the fact that there was a pair of tree trunks between him and me, obscuring his vision. But then I noticed the sand grains on the branch; I almost couldn't tell them apart from the tree's own chakra.

Acknowledging that I'd been caught, I dropped down. It was as good of a conversation opener as any, and who was I to deny myself this opportunity? I crossed my arms over my chest, inhaled a bit deeper than usual to puff myself up, and pushed my chakra outwards a bit. Speaking in an extremely slow drawl, slow enough that it was lazy sounding even by their sluggish standards, I said, "My apologies. I didn't mean to stare."

"Who are you?" Gaara demanded. His eyes locked onto the eyes of my mask, and for some reason, he didn't look away. Did my effect not work on jinchūriki or something?

"Kaminyojin Kenta, just a _cloud_ drifting by." I tilted my wrist a little bit so that the Kumogakure insignia on my gloves was easily visible. "Although, if my guess is right, I'll be competing against you in the exams."

"A Kumo ninja, in _Konoha?"_ Kankurō asked, a bit shocked if his tone were any indication. "I was still under the impression your lot hated Konoha."

I waved a hand dismissively. "Oh, we're all friends here. On paper, at least. I'm sure you know that feeling. How _is_ Suna, by the way?"

"It's fine," Kankurō grumbled.

"Why do you care?" Temari added.

Pointing my masked face at Temari, I shrugged. "I don't, not really. I was just curious." Then I turned to face Kankurō. "Sunagakure sounds like a place I would be miserable in. The torturous sun, the hot winds, the deadly sand..." I paused ever so slightly, turning my head to face Gaara. "...storms. Impressive ninja you may be, but I don't understand why you'd want to live out there. I like the cold and wet climate of Kumo, thank you very much."

Temari scoffed. "See, that sounds like hell to me. It explains why a creepy bastard like you exists."

"Creepy, am I?" I said, mocking offense. "You wound me. How am I _creepy_?"

"That mask," Kankurō answered for his sister, though she bobbed her head once in concordance.

"Hmm..." I reached a hand up to grab it. As I pulled, I performed a sealless, smokeless transformation jutsu on my face. Red, slit eyes replaced my own white ones, while my mouth stretched wider than anatomically possible. As a little extra flair, I stained the bits of beard and mustache around my mouth with fake blood to complete the illusion.

The mask came off. _**"**_ _ **sɓuı**_ ๅ _ **qıS puɐS ə**_ ๅ _ **ʇʇı**_ ๅ _**ʻɹəʇʇəq sıɥʇ sI?"**_

Temari and Kankurō jumped back and, in the latter's case, screamed. Gaara didn't look impressed. "Temari, Kankurō, control yourselves. It's only a transformation."

But they didn't listen. _"Kai!"_ they yelled together, forming the hand sign and flaring their chakra in an attempt to purge their systems. As I expected, nothing happened — it was no genjutsu — making them try again.

I put my mask in place and released the transformation. "See? I'm not that creepy."

"No, but my siblings are idiots," Gaara replied. The siblings in question flinched. "Temari, Kankurō, let's go."

"Yeah. That's... Yeah," Kankurō muttered.

"Agreed," Temari quickly added.

The two of them continued on their way, leaving me standing there alone, and leaving me wondering. The biggest question on my mind: was Gaara immune to my distortion effect? And if he was, why? Was it Shukaku?

I needed to find Naruto. This was something to test. I turned and started walking in the other direction.

If I hadn't had Hyūga blood in me, if I hadn't had my byakugan active, or if I had still been watching him with a good portion of my attention, I would have missed it. But I did and I was.

Shukaku's chakra twitched. Gaara paused. He looked back at me, then frowned. It took less than half a second, but in that moment, I knew that the ichibi was paying attention to me. That's probably not a good thing.

* * *

Like Gaara, Uzumaki Naruto oozed chakra into the air. _Unlike_ the desert jinchūriki, the orange-clad ninja's chakra cloud was all his own. Most likely driven by the pressure of holding the kyūbi at bay, his very human chakra was pushed out. But, at the same time, it was polarized. Kurama, as unbalanced as he was due to being half of himself, pushed the yang — the _physical_ — aspect of Naruto's chakra out as it overloaded him with even more yang chakra.

Seeking mental energies to balance itself out with, Naruto's cloud of mostly-physical energy latched onto the minds of those around him. From where I was watching, I could clearly see it swarming around his teammates' heads, and the heads of anyone Naruto interacted with in any way. And as faint and nearly undetectable as it was, the effect was _not_ negligible.

Sakura had the densest cloud by far, but in the time I'd been watching them, they'd spoken with both Asuma's team and Kurenai's, and it seemed to disproportionately favor the girls Naruto's age. I knew that there had to be some effect on their minds, but I didn't know them well enough, nor had I been watching for long enough, to be sure on exactly what the effect was.

And there was no way in hell I was getting close to him now. Sorry, Naruto, but supernatural mind manipulation is where I draw the line. Yes, I know I'm a hypocrite about that, especially considering what I just did to the sand siblings. Sue me.

I wish I knew what it was actually doing.

Okay, let me think about this. Yang chakra is the energy of life, but as it's not 100% pure physical energy, it still has the direction of his mind and soul guiding it. Maybe not consciously — and man, that's going to fuck with me so much if he's doing this willingly — but his unconscious mind has a say for sure. Chakra is the energy by which your will is enforced upon reality. What is his body's will? What is his subconscious desire?

Body. That's easy: pleasurable sensations. Good health, good food, physical contact, sex. What does his subconscious want? If he's even remotely close to canon, then that would be recognition, social contact, intimate connections, good physical contact with another human. If he's gone through puberty yet, and I'm almost certain he either has or is in the process, then sex is also on that list.

With that in mind...

Fuck, I have no idea if Sakura's more friendly or clingy to Naruto than in canon. It's been _years,_ and I'm having a hard time mentally separating late- _Shippuden_ Sakura from the original girl, what little I still remember of her, and from the fanon Sakura.

But the idea that he's blasting a "look at me/love me/fuck me" aura disturbed me. He wouldn't even know he's doing it, nor would anyone he's doing it on notice it. Hinata might, if she's trained her byakugan enough, but that all depends on her identifying the effect and realizing that something's off about it before she can normalize it.

And looking at Naruto himself, I don't think she'd ever care. His chakra is brilliantly bright and pleasing to look at, while his body... Imagine that hypothetical "perfect lover" male protagonist from an erotic novel, a kind but lustful man who's impossibly sexy and who couldn't actually exist in real life. That guy every guy, straight or gay, wishes they could be. Now imagine him as an innocent child, and put him in a startlingly bright orange jumpsuit that hides all his muscular definition and the already impressive size of his manhood.

That's Naruto.

Going by that alone, it's obvious why he would have caught Hinata's eyes specifically. Going by his personality — what vague generalizations of it I can remember — it's obvious why he _kept_ her attention. If he put a little bit of effort into his appearance, I'm almost certain that he'd be the guy that gets... every... single... girl...

Oh, God.

Oh merciful Lord in Heaven, hallowed be thine name, I pray to you for a miracle! Tell me I'm not in a harem fic!

...

Wait.

I could copy that.

It would be hard, and I'd need to practice it a metric fuck-ton, but _I could copy that._

Oh Satan, Lord of Sin, I would sell my soul for this! **_Please_** let this be a harem fic!

Actually, if this is some sort of fanfiction...

 _Yo,_ Author of mine! Can I get some nice ass here? Double puberty sucks!

...

I have no idea if that worked. I was never all that religious before, and it's not like my author would even give me copious amounts of sex whenever I felt like it. I'd write a _good_ story, not smut.

... Oh, _fuck_. A good story means that something terrible is going to happen to me for the sake of drama. I'm doomed.

And on top of that, I've now given myself an existential crisis. Isn't that supposed to be saved for the fictional characters? Unless I'm now fictional too. Damn, finding Naruto was supposed to give me answers, not toss me down the rabbit hole of existential dread.

You know what? I'm just going to go back to the hotel. I've had enough for one day. I literally can't _even_.

See how bad it's getting? My brain isn't even completing its own thoughts.

Fuck.

* * *

"Kenta?" Haruka asked as I passed her in the hallway. "Your back early."

"Nope."

"Wait, what?"

"Nope."

"What do you mean, _nope?"_

I stared her straight in the eyes, dragon mask firmly in place. "Nope." Then I turned and walked into my room and flopped down on the futon that Takeshi hadn't claimed already. "Nope," I repeated once more, using a chakra thread to slam the door that I'd accidentally left open.

"Kenta, are you alright?"

" _ **¡**_ ꓯꓘꓵꓤꓯ _ **H ʻ⅄**_ ꓯ _ **M**_ ꓯ ꓘꓛꓵꓞ ꓱ _ **H**_ ꓕ _**O**_ ꓨ"

She got the message. Somehow.

Then I closed my eyes, shut off my byakugan, and _noped_ the rest of the day away.

* * *

When the door to my hotel room opened, and the rest of my team entered, I had almost completely restored my supply of _fucks to give._ As it was, I was still curled up under my blankets.

The first thing out of Katsumi's mouth was, "Are you ready to start being a human being again?"

The first thing out of _my_ mouth was, _"HIISSSSSSSSSSS!"_ With a little unintentional chakra spilling into my throat, it came out a good bit more animalistic sounding than the already inhuman sound should have been.

"Sheesh, what's got you all worked up? What the hell happened?"

Aww, she really does care.

Fucks to give: +1.

"Bleh. It's not important," I muttered. "Just... something related to my old life."

"Right, that life where you were an alien," Haruka butts in. She's long since accepted the _reincarnated_ part, but she still doesn't believe me when I say I wasn't human. A lie, technically, but one I chose to stick with. "What the hell did you even look like in your past life?"

An opportunity for pranking — fucks to give: +5.

I pulled the covers tightly over me, then weaved a couple hand signs. A few chakra threads to shut the door and the blinds, a few more hand signs to amp my bloodline's speed, and then I rocketed out from under the covers, throwing them towards my team as a distraction.

I latched onto the wall, then the ceiling, as I closed the gap between me and them. In a tiny fraction of a second, far faster than they could have reacted, considering my distraction, I was right above them.

I waited until they looked up, then I opened my transformed jaws, opened my _second_ jaws, and roared at them.

Why yes, I _was_ a xenomorph. A warrior caste, if you wanted to be specific. Being a sci-fi fan in ninja-land was awesome.

They all yelped, even the normally silent Takeshi, and jumped back. Laughing now, I let go and dropped to the floor. "Ask and you shall receive."

"Kami, that's terrifying."

I chuckled, then dropped the transformation. "Nah, what's terrifying is watching our face-huggers forcefully implant our children's embryos into creatures we captured, then watching as our babies explode out of their chests. Imagine my surprise when I found out you humans _don't_ die horrible deaths to give birth to your own young." I put on the most innocent smile I could manage.

They all went a bit green. Katsumi especially looked like she was going to hurl, though no one actually did. After giving them a second to digest that, I said. "Actually, that's bullshit. I just made that up." Pause for effect. "But there are eggs involved." Technically, egg cells.

"Nope." Katsumi spun and walked out of the room.

I clapped my hands once. "And now she feels like I did earlier today."

"Ugh, did you have to do that?" Haruka demanded. We went out of our way to bring you dinner," — she held up a bag (though without my byakugan active, I couldn't see what was inside of it) and set it on the counter — "and you had to go and drop _that_ on us. I'm going to have _nightmares,_ I just know it."

"Ehh... shit, I'm really sorry. I didn't think that through."

She huffed and rolled her eyes. "Yeah, whatever. Enjoy your ramen." She too promptly left the hotel room, leaving me alone.

No, wait, Takeshi was still here.

"Are you going to freak out too?"

He shook his head. "That was cool."

I blinked. "Really?"

He nodded once.

"Huh. Neat."

I went and opened the container of ramen. It smelled heavenly. Hmm... I wonder if it's the same kind Naruto was so fond of?


	5. 5 Falling Hail

The morning after my existential crisis and the _Alien_ fiasco, I pulled out the documents I had on Uzumaki Naruto and Gaara of the Desert. Despite their earlier desires to not know this information, I shared the details about the jinchūriki with my teammates.

"These are Gaara and Naruto. I spotted them yesterday, along with their teammates, Temari and Kankurō for Gaara, and Uchiha Sasuke and Haruno Sakura for Uzumaki Naruto. Every single one of them should be on our do-not-fuck-with list."

"I can understand Gaara," Katsumi commented, "but _Naruto?_ This guy's done _one_ A-rank and a bunch of D-ranks, and I'm willing to bet the A-rank was a fluke Plus, we met him last night."

"Well, you're right. But, what this _doesn't_ say is that Gaara is the unstable-as-fuck jinchūriki of the ichibi who can see through and murder with his sand, while Naruto is..." Wait, what? "You met him last night?"

Katsumi bobbed her head. "Yep, we ran into him at the ramen restaurant. He seemed nice enough."

"He's the jinchūriki of the Kyūbi and passively leaks unbalanced, mind-altering chakra. Given prolonged exposure or physical contact, he'll definitely affect how you think. I watched him subtly work on his own teammates and allies."

Maybe I was stretching it a little bit, but on the slim chance that he might try to therapy punch Katsumi, or worse, induct her into his (hypothetical) harem, I had to protect her.

"Seriously?!"

"Yeah. I'm not exactly a mind-reader, so I can't be sure of the exact effect, but any foreign chakra messing with your mental energy produces psychological changes. From what I could gather before my... episode, it likely works along with his unconscious desires. The unconscious desires of a lonely, preteen boy. Take a guess as to which of his allies were the most affected."

Katsumi shuddered, turning slightly green.

"How sure of this are you?" our teacher queried.

"One hundred percent that there is an exchange of chakra that affects the spirit energy of the victim, disproportionately targeting females of his age range. Everything else is educated speculation based on my own observations and experimentation with chakra, and what little I know of Uzumaki," I replied, tapping the notes with my fingers and slipping into _debriefing_ mode. "Also one hundred percent sure that he is the Leaf's jinchūriki. Assuming no bijū has changed hands, he is the container of the nine-tails."

Haruka only had to think for half a second. "Alright, as lead jōnin of this team, I'm implementing a temporary restriction on contact with either jinchūriki or their respective teams. Whenever it can be avoided without arousing suspicion, do not speak with them, do not interact with them, do not fight them, and do not linger in their presence. If any of the above must be violated, genin Kaminyojin Kenta is authorized to monitor the situation and order a retreat if necessary. In the event of a potential psychological compromise, Kenta is authorized to monitor our health and demand any of us to be removed, isolated, or restrained. Is that understood?"

"Yes, ma'am," we all acknowledged as one.

"Sensei," I added, "my observations and instincts say that the risk of compromise in the short-term is low and that the long-term effects might be reversible with separation. I do not believe such actions will likely be necessary, but I accept the role. In return, I ask that you all monitor me in return. I will, of course, submit to your judgment on the matter."

"Noted, genin, and appreciated." Her face relaxed a bit, causing the rest of us to relax as well. Apparently out of _commander_ mode, Haruka continued, "I'll make sure that there's a messenger bird with this intel headed to Kumo ASAP. Is there anything else we should know?"

I shook my head. "Not of this magnitude. Just that I did manage to look into booking a training field. It—"

"I looked into that as well," she interjected.

"And now I feel redundant," I griped lightheartedly. "Anyway, that's it."

Haruka stood from her chair. "If that is all..."

"Yeah, that's... wait, actually, there was something I wanted to ask... It's only related to yesterday because the implications of Uzumaki Naruto's ability made me think of it, and it's a weird question, but... are harems a thing in this world?"

Sensei gave me an owlish blink. "What."

"Never mind," I hastily backpedaled. "Forget that."

"No. You just caught me off guard, that's all. 'Weird question' is right. But yeah, harems are a thing. They're a fucking annoying thing, that's for sure. A harem pops up and suddenly all the girls are snatched up by one fucker, leaving only married guys, frustrated and aggressive guys that can't get dates, guys who aren't interested, and guys who fall into such despair that they turn gay!" Her voice progressively moved towards a growl. "And that leaves us few girls who don't get sucked into that _fuckpile_ to deal with an overabundance of assholes and uninterested guys!"

"You, _ah_ , sound like you have personal experiences with that..." I muttered.

"You think!?" She took a deep breath. "Sorry. Yeah, they're real. Annoying as fuck to the rest of us, unfortunately."

"You think Naruto is a harem builder." While I thought something along those lines, it was Katsumi who actually voiced it aloud. "His power..."

"A regular old _Heartbreaker_ , he'll be... if he ever takes that jumpsuit off," I replied, though the last part was muttered under my breath.

As I said before, most of this was just speculation based on a rather frightening observation. But the last thing we needed was a Naruto that was sexually active getting his grubby hands on the heir to my clan. If Uzumaki Kushina had been kidnapped in this world as she had been in canon, a woman from my clan of rapists and bloodline thieves having sex with Naruto would be disastrous for both Kumogakure as a whole and our clan specifically. If he had a harem to boot, Katsumi would end up being labeled a slut too, I'm sure of it.

But this conversation also made me rethink my "prayers" from just before my little meltdown. I'd been thinking with my dick — i.e. _how can I get as many women and men as possible to want to have sex with me at the same time._ In reality, that was an utterly awful idea. I wasn't even interested in forming romantic relationships, let alone multiple.

"It's a good thing we don't have to stay here all that long," Katsumi remarked.

I'll say. I was _not_ keen on lingering in the Leaf any longer than necessary now. My fanboying was done; I already did that silently yesterday. Now if we could just get on with the exams...

* * *

The three of us were scouting the competition while Haruka did some jōnin-related business that we weren't privy to. Despite my orders, I navigated us so that Naruto and company would stay well within my considerable field of vision (and effective weapons range) all day. It wasn't all that hard to do, to be honest, but the chakra shadows made it nearly impossible for me to lip-read at this distance.

It was a little hard to tell, but I think Naruto was a bit more touchy-feely with Sakura and Hinata than a truly innocent boy would have normally been. All signs were converging on me being on me being an observer in a _Naruto_ harem fic, and that was making me just a bit paranoid. After all, if the blob of malevolent goo that was Zetsu was still running about and he was still trying to resurrect Ōtsutsuki Kaguya, then we definitely had a problem, especially if our protagonist was distracted by the sexy.

I had the ten-fold jutsu active. It was a Kaminyojin bloodline technique that accelerated us to ten times our base speed, mentally and physically. Since my base speed was about three times what a normal human was, I was operating at nearly thirty times human normals. Physically incapable of speaking or understanding speech at this speed, I resorted to hand-signs to communicate with my teammates. They did the same for the reverse.

Within the documents Lord Ay had given me, there were sketched copies of every chūnin-hopeful's registration photo (because working photocopiers were very rare). Using those and the text descriptions, I had a good idea of everyone I was looking for. As I found them, I cataloged specific details that hadn't been in the documents — new weapons, strange chakras, body modifications, and the like. In correspondence with that, I also assigned them ratings on a very different scale than what was normally used.

I also took into consideration my teammates own opinions. Whenever we had the opportunity, I moved them towards one of our opponents so that my teammates had a chance to form an opinion. I was going to share these notes with my teammates later, so the more accurate I made them now, the better.

* * *

Earlier that morning, I had explained my rating system — technically stolen from _Worm_ but modified for _Naruto_ — to my teammates. Each person got a set of labels, a word and a number, that describes both how to fight them and how dangerous they were in that category.

The categories were:

~ Mover: Those with powers enhancing mobility above the norm for a ninja.

~Shaker: Those with powers with an area-of-effect ability, especially in regard to creating and manipulating environmental hazards.

~Brute: Those with a personal strength or durability-enhancing effect, or those who regenerated.

~Breaker: Those who can modify their body to apparently "break" the laws of physics or create a chakra cloak that modifies how they interact with the world.

~Master: Those who can control others or create minions, including summoners.

~Tinkers: Those who use special tools in their fighting style, including puppet and fūinjutsu masters.

~Blaster: Someone who is a ranged, offensive threat, especially users of fire-and-forget styles of jutsu.

~Thinker: Someone who has an information-gathering or processing ability, including all sensors and dōjutsu users.

~Striker: A person with a touch-based or melee-ranged ability, including taijutsu and melee weapons.

~Changer: Someone who alters their form or appearance, not counting the academy transformation jutsu that everyone could do.

~Trump: Someone who manipulates other people's chakra and jutsus directly.

~Stranger: Someone with unusual stealth or infiltration techniques.

Most ninja, _especially_ high-ranking ones, would have an arsenal of jutsu that covered a huge array of categories, so I decided to focus on the top four when assigning classifications. As for the number, it went on a scale of 0 to 10, where 0 was civilian level and 10 was effectively unstoppable by anyone other than a kage, and numbers above ten being fully unstoppable. It's not a E/D/C/B/A/S ranking, regarding the difficulty or chakra-intensity of the jutsu or overall skill of the ninja, but simply how hard it is to fight them.

For example, I would rate myself as Thinker 8/Blaster 8/Tinker 4/Mover 2. Katsumi would be Shaker 6/Striker 4/Mover 3/Blaster 2, while Takeshi would be Striker 6/Mover 1/Master 1/Changer 1.

What that meant was:

Hiding from me and staying out of my assault range is nigh impossible. I'm far less dangerous up-close and I'll struggle with a moving target. Separating me from my tools makes me significantly weaker, but I'm fast enough that that might be difficult.

Katsumi controls the battlefield; staying mobile and isolated from allies is critical around her, as grouping together only plays to her strengths. She's quick and dangerous in melee combat as well, so assaulting from afar works best.

Takeshi is extremely dangerous up close. He's quick, but not absurdly so. He tends to create or summon minions, but they aren't much of a threat. His physical form isn't wholly consistent, so expect abnormal motions when fighting him.

Basically, in four words and four numbers each, I could communicate the major strengths of an opponent and the best strategy for fighting them, even if their abilities varied widely. It had nothing to do with ninja rank, nor did it say anything about how one person's abilities would interact with another's. It said nothing about their titles or rank-on-paper, and it didn't give the whole range of their abilities. It was a pure combat strategy identification system based on the target's known abilities.

* * *

Haruka thumbed through my notes, her eyes wide. I'd only had to explain the system to her once, and about a quarter of the way through my explanation, she'd started getting excited. Now, as she flipped through my ratings for everyone in the exams, I could see the gears spinning in her head. "This... this is brilliant. I've never even heard of most of these people, let alone met them, and yet you've basically given me amazing instructions on how to fight them all! This is going to revolutionize Kumo's information gathering system. A little one-line blurb in our bingo books for every entry and our chances of victory go way up. You thought of this?"

I shook my head. "A smart man from my past life did. I just modified it for ninja use."

Haruka handed my notes back to Takeshi and Katsumi, who were still trying to mentally associate faces and rankings together for their own use. Though they hadn't said it in nearly as many words (or any words in Takeshi's case), I could tell that they were just as impressed.

"Well, either way, this is going to help a lot. There are several times I got into a fight with a supposedly B or C rank ninja, only to have the fight feel like an A rank one, or vice versa," Haruka replied. "And the bingo books don't distinguish people who are strong for their rank from those who lucked into a rank as good as they got. This could fix that."

"Twelve categories and eleven rankings within each? That's a lot more fidelity," I replied in total agreement with her.

Crossing her arms over her chest, my sensei asked, "Okay, there's talk among the jōnin that you should have been one of us for a while because of your genius, but seriously, how much of your supposed genius is due to your last life?"

"Forty percent? Maybe? I'd also put another fifty or so percent on my two bloodlines synergizing so well."

"Explain, please." She gestured for me to continue.

I adjusted my weight so that I was more comfortable in my seat, then launched into my explanation. "I was born with the knowledge of something like chakra," — chakra is like chakra, right? — "plus a whole bunch of other information like an education in electrical and mechanical... _**ɓuıɹəəuıɓuə**_. For lack of a better translation, let's call it smithing.

"In the beginning, the former gave me an edge in developing my chakra, including letting me start training just out of the womb. Seriously, chakra was an entirely new sense, my eyes were beyond awesome, and I was bored as fuck as a baby. I figured out wall walking before I was physically strong enough to walk; it was wall _crawling_."

There were eyebrows raised at that. "Shit. You're serious?" Haruka asked.

"Yeah. I am. Kaminyojin Masaru can confirm it for you, if you ask him," I grinned at her. By now, my teammates were listening as well. "Anyway, I also had eyes that let me see chakra. You won't believe how easy it was to get perfect control when you don't have to rely on a nebulous sense and can _see_ how your every thought affected your chakra. And, seeing as I was a baby and had never been taught hand signs, I figured out what I could do without them." Tapping my fingers together, I spun chakra threads and connected them to each other. Then, I pulled my fingers apart and loosened the external coating of the threads; they went from invisible to sparking with lightning in an instant.

The first time I'd done this, I immediately went and created a lightning whip jutsu. It wasn't the most effective or efficient of attacks, but damn if it didn't look cool.

Letting the power lines fade from my fingers, I started speaking again. "So, my body had given me a way to see chakra, see a huge distance from me, and get a high voltage current exactly where I wanted it to go. My reincarnation gave me an additional _decade_ to develop this ability — sixteen years instead of six, and the time-altering effect of my clan's bloodline gave me even more on top of that. But my reincarnation also left me with knowledge of a whole class of weapons and tools that don't exist in this world: railguns and _**sɔıʇoqoɹ**_. I don't have the resources to build a true _**ʇoqoɹ,**_ but building an _**ɔıuoɹʇɐɯıuɐ**_ — a lightning-powered puppet — was easy enough to do instead. And, well, when you have the focus and intelligence of an adult, the boundless energy of a child, the curiosity to investigate, and a body that literally makes training fun, it's not hard to get really strong really fast.

"That said, going through puberty again sucked. This whole _growing up twice_ thing has wreaked havoc on my mind, but none more than puberty in an alien body." Chakra amplified everything, including puberty. In a way, it _was_ alien to me; that wasn't even a lie.

"So, you're not a genius, you've just gotten a head start on everyone." It was Katsumi who said that, not Haruka. By now, my notes had been totally forgotten as they'd become engrossed in my tale.

"The average Kumo ninja spends three years in the academy, plus a year or two learning with their parents and two or three years learning under a jōnin sensei. That's seven years of general education at most, and that varies greatly from person to person. Most ninja master literacy and mathematics on the fly, having been only taught the basics in favor of the stuff they'll need to survive in the field. Conversely, my people had a _mandated_ thirteen-year education program, where some of the smartest people went back for more, often adding four, six, or rarely even _fourteen_ years of additional, specialized education. We lived a long time, relatively speaking, and we had a lot that needed to be taught. I myself died and was reborn having spent seventeen years, the vast majority of my life, in school."

"That's insane!"

I shrugged. "Ninja educations seem pitifully small to me. Keep in mind, we weren't a warrior culture, we abhorred the idea of child soldiers, and most places didn't even allow children under the age of fifteen to hold a job. By that age, we'd already completed the majority of our education, and by the time we were legally adults, the mandated education was done."

"Hmm... Yeah, now I can understand that a bit better," Haruka remarked.

"That's still ridiculous," Katsumi argued. Takeshi nodded along with her. "How do you get anything done?"

"Most people retire at sixty-five, not thirty-five," I countered right back. "Our average life expectancy was eighty and climbing, not _fifty._ " Ninja did live just as long as my worlds humans, perhaps even longer, but that was _only_ if they made it to retirement. Most did not.

Takashi huffed, picked up the notes he and Katsumi were _supposed_ to be reviewing before tomorrow's exams, and waved them in our face. "We have work," he said.

Katsumi blinked, then blushed. "Oh, yeah. We got a bit distracted, didn't we?"

I sheepishly rubbed the back of my head. Grinning awkwardly, and without even my mask to obscure it, I said, "Yeah, sorry about that. You're right, we've got work to do."

Silence fell upon the four of us, with only the shuffling of papers filling the room with sound. Information was the key to victory, and we had a lot to go through.

* * *

Finally, the day of the first exam had come. Each of us, dressed in our full combat attire, stood in front of our sensei. Even though she was not the woman who had trained me initially, she had helped me greatly in the little over a month that I'd known her. She easily held my respect, as she held the respect of her own, original students.

We stood before her as she gave us some words of advice, and we listened.

"You are the ninja of Kumogakure. These next five weeks, you will represent our village and our country. Your success or failure will reflect on our village, yes, but more importantly, it will reflect on you. There's always next time, true, but if you win here, win now, wouldn't that just be amazing? If nothing else, give it your all for your own sake. Got it?"

"Yes, ma'am!" we cheered.

She gave us a thumbs-up. "Excellent! Now I expect you to kick everyone's asses for me and make me proud! I'll be watching."

The three of us quickly made our way towards the Konoha Ninja Academy, where the first part of the exam was being held. Our spirits were high and our egos were stroked. We could do this!


	6. 6 Biting Snow

Our feet gently ascended the stairs with the silent grace only ninja could manage. Even Katsumi and I, who practically bounced up the stairs in low gravity from our own perspectives, had a level of grace that kept our footfalls soundless.

When the two of them veered off on the second floor to head to where they _thought_ the exam was, to where everyone else seemed to be heading, I grabbed their wrists and pulled them onwards. "Trust me. We don't want to go that way."

"But room 301's right there," Katsumi said, pointing through the stairwell door to the clearly visible room and the crowd surrounding it.

"Trust me." I tapped the fake glass eye of my mask.

The illusion was interesting, from a chakra perspective. I wouldn't have noticed it if my byakugan were off, it was so subtle, but I could definitely see it with my eyes on. The chakra was attached like a bubble's film around the room in question at a wide enough radius that it hit us in the stairwell. There was a slight spiritual pressure on the parts of our brain that dealt with vision and spatial awareness. In short, it made you see something different and made your mental sense of location agree with that assessment. Only in self-reflection (or with hax eyes) could you see through it.

I pulled them onwards, despite their protests, and showed them the _real_ third floor. "Oh," Katsumi realized. "Genjutsu?"

"Yup."

"So, all those ninja down there...?"

"Are idiots."

"Hey!"

I aimed my face in her direction. "The test has _already_ started. This is phase one. We're in hostile territory now."

Her shoulders sagged ever so slightly. "Oh. Right."

The three of us walked into the _real_ room 301. There, we found the proctor sitting at the back of the room and submitted the very last of our paperwork. Up until we turned that in, we merely had slots reserved for us in the exams. Now? It was official, and there was no backing down.

We took our seats. I intentionally picked some close to the back of the room, near the door we'd come in. None of the Konoha rookies were here _just_ yet, but I could already see Ino, Chōji, and Shikamaru approaching. I couldn't help it; I wanted to be close.

"They're staring at us," Katsumi remarked softly. The tension in the room was palpable, and nobody dared speak louder than a soft whisper.

"We're the only Kumo ninja in the room. Of course, they're staring at us." I let out a long breath. "I wish we had some anonymity, but there's only three of us. Anyone who's done even a fraction of the research we have will know our names."

"You're right about that." Of all people, _Kabuto_ sat down next to us. "You're hardly anonymous, Kaminyojin Kenta."

I didn't face him, but I did speak to him. "Yakushi Kabuto."

"You know me? I didn't know my name had reached Kumo."

"It's public record. I know the value of research," I replied.

"As do I." His hand slid down to his side and into his pouch. From within, he drew a deck of roughly two hundred chakra-encoded cards and set them on the long table beside us. He didn't even need to unveil them to me; their contents were as clear as day to my eyes. He drew out the card with my face on it, though the mask I wore was my simpler one and that younger me had less than half of my current tattoos. I recognized that photo; it was the one from my promotion to special chūnin. "Kaminyojin Kenta, age sixteen. 212 D-ranks, 27 C-ranks, 2 B-Ranks, and an A-Rank. No mission failures, _ever_. Was field-promoted to special chūnin, but demoted recently due to insubordination. Rumored to be a product of the Kaminyojin Blo—"

I'm fairly certain that my hand around his throat was why he stopped talking, but if anyone asks, I'm going to say he merely realized that spilling such information probably wasn't a good idea. And if he happened to find himself unable to talk, well, that _definitely_ had _nothing to do_ with the lightning chakra I shoved into the chakra points around his neck.

"Kabuto, my good man," I whispered just loud enough for the choking man to hear me. "I don't have blood on my hands. You know why? Because I'm a sniper. I'm never close enough to get the blood splatter on me. So, if you decide to keep running your mouth, you'll have a very long way to run to get away from me. But, if you decide to keep quiet and be a good little boy, I'll never have to look in your direction again. Got it?"

So what if I'm a bit sensitive about where I came from? So what if I'm a bit sensitive about the appearance of my demotion? I'm a warrior. I'm allowed to get pissed occasionally. Hell, I've styled myself around a fucking _rage dragon._ Besides, I know he was a spy of Orochimaru's. Allies, especially spies pretending to be allies, should know when to not open their mouths and spill each other's secrets. There is a time and a place for everything, and this is not fucking it.

Kabuto nodded as best as he could given that my meaty hands were wrapped around his neck. I would have loved to strangle him to death, or maybe fry his insides, but I really couldn't cause a more of a scene than I already had. With a shove, I released him.

He gasped for air, then stood on shaky legs. His teammates came to support him.

"Dude, you're scary when you're mad," Katsumi muttered.

Almost at exactly the same moment, however, Yamanaka Ino marched over to me. "What the hell do you think you're doing, attacking a Leaf Shinobi like that?!"

I took a long, calming breath, then took an equally long look at her. Her eyes stared back at me with piercing intensity. "Bah... he insulted my honor and my clan." I picked up the deck of cards Kabuto had accidentally left sitting next to me. "Plus, he's a bit arrogant, flaunting his research like this." I flipped through to Ino's card, then used my chakra to hack into the encoding and make it visible; it was a bit like picking a lock when you could see the pins — utterly easy for me. "Yamanaka Ino, heiress to the Yamanaka clan. Height, weight, mission record, recorded strengths and weaknesses... boy, Kabuto's card has a lot of information about you that would be dangerous in the wrong hands." I flipped the card around and handed it to her. She hesitantly took it. It took her only half a second to go from confused to pissed.

The cards had three states: hidden, short, and long. Hidden was blank and short had only the bare-bones information, but long had plenty of other juicy secrets, stuff that he shouldn't have known. "That bastard!" Ino shouted at the top of her lungs, drawing the attention of everyone who wasn't already looking at us.

Taking the deck, I activated all the cards and started hurling them around the room. Every single one of them ended up exactly where I wanted it to: right in front of the individual genin that card was about. Suffice to say, within seconds, there were a _lot_ of angry genin, and all of them were looking for Kabuto.

And guess who they _weren't_ looking at anymore? That's right, my team.

"Smooth," Takeshi commented, having reached the same conclusion.

"Thanks."

Shortly after that fiasco, Hinata's team entered, followed by Neji's a moment later. I eyed my two cousins. Neither of them had a chakra network around their eyes as well-developed as I did. And why would they? If canon was any indication, they used their byakugan far less than I did. As for their teammates, I didn't pay them much attention other than making passing observations, such as seeing the defect in Rock Lee's chakra network or the bugs inside Shino's body.

Then, like a ball of sunshine, came Naruto and his team. I flared my charka a bit, coating the inside of my head with more physically natured chakra. Then I signaled my teammates to do the same.

Naruto stepped into the room. Like a miasma, his chakra flooded the room, gravitating towards people's heads. In light of the effect of his chakra, that smile struck me as more malicious than it probably was — my paranoia was definitely skewing my perception right now.

Up close, with a lot of people to compare, I saw how Naruto's chakra pushed out and acted among strangers. It definitely was less pronounced than total strangers, while Ino, Hinata, and Sakura were affected the most. Hinata was definitely blushing, while Ino and Sakura weren't harping on him like I'd wondered if they would. Maybe I was overreacting?

Wait, Ino was brushing against Naruto now. And so was Sakura. Were they aware they're doing it? I couldn't tell, but they weren't pulling away either. And now Hinata was moving closer to the jinchūriki too.

I signed to my teammates. [Stay Back. I investigate. No apparent danger. Team uncompromised. Stay alert.]

[Affirmative,] they signed back.

I stood and started moving closer to Naruto. His eyes met my dragon mask's, and like with Gaara, there was no subtle twitch-flinch upon seeing it, unlike literally everyone else every single time they made eye-contact with it. Was it a jinchūriki thing? I'm really suspecting it was.

Shoving the questions about the nature of the bijū and their hosts aside, I covered the last few feet between him and me. "You know, you and your friends are a bit too green to be taking these exams. Still, I'm curious to see how well you'll all do." Taking out the last of the ninja cards Kabuto had, I handed them to each of the rookies. "By the way, I took these off a leaf ninja named Kabuto. Nobody should be carrying that many of their allies' secrets."

That got the rookies frustrated, but before they could go do anything, I singled out Naruto. "Uzumaki, right?"

"Yeah?" The blond kid asked. The moment he spoke to me, his chakra miasma lurched towards my head. I deflected it internally with my own chakra, but it kept trying.

Not letting my annoyance (and a slight amount of fear) taint my voice, I said, "I'm Kaminyojin Kenta. You met my teammates the other night at that ramen stand. Katsumi and Takeshi? Them."

"Oh!" His face lit up and the smile returned in full force. "They were nice. Are they here too?"

"They're around. But that's actually what I wanted to talk to you about." I clutched his shoulder. My voice dropped half an octave. "Stay away from them."

The miasma changed. It struck me a different way, one easily countered considering how slow it was. The timing of the reaction was key, however; it reacted as soon as I spoke with hostility. "What?! Why!?"

"I'm _really_ sensitive to ambient chakra, and you're leaking all over the place. I'd say you were slobbering like a dog, but that would be an insult to dogs. It's disgusting watching you coil your chakra around the minds of everyone around you, watching you twist what they are."

"What?! I'm not doing anything like that! You're just making stuff up!" He thinks he's innocent; there were no tells to suggest he's lying, as far as my eyes could see, not even in his brain's chakra flow. So, it really is unconscious? Well, that's points in his favor, at least.

I made a show of glancing around. "Uchiha. You have the sharingan, right? Can you look at what his chakra is doing around other people? Hyūga, you too. He's influencing _everyone."_

As I said that, I deactivated my own byakugan so that they wouldn't see it active. I also nudged my mask to give me a sliver of peripheral vision with which to see.

Sasuke's eyes turned red, while the veins around the eyes of the Hyūga cousins bulged. "He's right, you're leaking chakra, Naruto," Sasuke said.

"Lady Hinata, your head's practically covered in his chakra. There's a reason you were instructed to keep away from him," Neji said. "As this man pointed out, this is one of those reasons. Control yourself, Uzumaki."

"I'm not doing anything!" Naruto shouted defensively.

"I-I knew he was doing that," Hinata softly spoke, "but I didn't think it was doing anything."

"Chakra that unbalanced messes with the spirit chakra of anyone it touches. He's whispering into your mind and soul," I stated. Aside from being a warning, my comment was also something of a probe; my own teammates had not thought the statement was odd when I first told them, and neither did anyone now react as if it did. I was by no means an expert on chakra, and probing what is supposedly common knowledge can give insight into it.

"Come, Hinata," Neji demanded. "We must distance you from him."

"I'm not doing anything!" Naruto insisted again, a little more desperation in his voice this time.

I leaned in closer and whispered, "Maybe you aren't but maybe it's that which is sealed within you." He stiffened. "You know what I'm talking about. Now, until you can get your chakra under control, stay away from my team."

And with that, I turned and strolled back to my team, hands in my pockets. Reactivating my byakugan, I watched Naruto start to panic.

Strangely, the fox in his gut reacted too, if the shift in its chakra was anything to go by. Naruto's expression subtly shifted at about the same time.

I frowned. Was he already talking to the fox?

By the time I reached my teammates again, Ino had made herself scarce, Hinata was still a distance away and occupied by her cousin, Sakura had been taken aside by Sasuke, and the others had followed their respective teammates, leaving a very confused Naruto standing mostly by himself.

[Observing?] I signed.

[Affirmative. Threat?]

[Minor. Active. Mildly hostile. Threat diminished.] As paradoxical as those last two sign phrases were, hostility was slightly better for us, as it carried with it less risk of subversion. "Uzumaki Naruto," I said, switching back to the spoken language, "Classification: Master — emotional subversion."

"Understood."

* * *

In contrast to the pre-exam waiting period, the exam itself was utterly boring. It was _exactly_ as I remembered it from canon. That wasn't a surprise, as the intelligence I'd gotten from Lord Ay had suggested it would be this written test.

As we'd walked in, I whispered to my teammates, I'll be watching. Considering my warning from before we'd left and my words from just a moment ago, it barely took them even a moment to make the connection to cheating on the exam, then to using _me_ to cheat.

Alas, yet again, I am nothing more than a tool for the use of those around me. A breeding stud for my clan and an answer book for my team. _Oh, woe is me._

But seriously, within ten seconds, both had signaled me for help, and help I did. I sent chakra strings out my feet, across the floor, into their chakra points, through their bodies, and into their hands. To give you an idea of how insane that actually was, it was like a surgeon trying to operate with his feet on the invisible man. I was probably the only person in the world that could pull it off.

Of course, it would have been easier if I could have used the Nara shadow jutsu, like the one stretching across the floor behind me right now, but alas, I could not. What it did give me was full, independent control of the limbs of both of my teammates. Puppetry, but with my electric chakra controlling them and numbing their muscles from the inside out. They could not even fight back well, as my chakra displaced theirs.

Then, with my byakugan active, I found the plants and started writing down the same answers they did.

As soon as they were done, I had my teammates flip their papers over, then released them from my control. As for me, since I had so much time to kill, I started doodling a bunch of eyes on the back of my paper. And since they were eyes from various fictional characters and _Naruto_ characters that I'd never seen before, the distortion took hold full-force.

Wait... are Neji and Hinata bleeding from their noses? Crap. And now some of the proctors are bleeding too. Double crap.

"Number twenty-seven! Stop disrupting the testing environment!"

Sheepishly, I erased my doodles and then scribbled what was left out. "Sorry," I softly whispered.

A _long_ half-hour later (it was a subjective hour and a half for me and longer still for Katsumi), the tenth question finally came. Naruto made his declaration that he wouldn't let the question scare him, as I'd expected, but it wasn't _nearly_ as impassioned as I'd thought it had been in canon. I think I might have made the guy depressed; who would have guessed? Even with his speech, people still dropped out.

I think I'm finally, really stepping on butterflies now. After these exams, I'm going to basically throw out the last remnants of my foreknowledge as useless.

With an explosion of glass, the sexy woman known as Mitarashi Anko smashed her way into the room and hung her banner, proudly proclaiming herself as the proctor of the second stage of the exam.

"You're early, Anko," Ibiki deadpanned.

And just like that, the wind was taken from her sails. "Yeah, yeah. You at least cut a decent number of them out. Not as many as I'd hoped but more than I'd feared."

"Someone got them all riled up before the exam started," Ibiki replied, looking right at me. So, they were watching that? Hmm... I wonder what the Hokage will think of his precious jinchūriki's effect on people's minds.

"Then whoever that was was doing your job for you." Anko upped her volume and addressed us all. "Alright, everyone still here, your senseis will have instructions on when and where to meet tomorrow morning. Be there or you fail. Dismissed."

* * *

"Hey, wait up!"

We were outside the Academy, headed back to the market district of Konoha to get lunch, when Ino ran up to us. Without discussion of any kind, we simultaneously paused, allowing her to approach. She walked up to us, to me specifically.

"Look, I wanted to thank you."

I cocked my head a little to the side. "For what?"

"Naruto. The Yamanaka clan specializes in mind and memory jutsu; we take mental health deadly seriously. If you'd just been flinging accusations about Naruto, I'd be mad at you, but since Sasuke and Neji both saw it too, I decided to take a look at my own head. I want to say Naruto's a sweet guy, but I did find traces of manipulation. I'm going to my father to check the extent of the damage. If it weren't for you..."

"Mind manipulation scares me," I said, "but what scares me more is that it seemed to target girls more, and my cousin, the heir to my clan, had already been exposed. If you find out the exact nature of the manipulation, please let me know."

"Can do," she cheerfully replied. "I'll see you tomorrow at the next stage." And with that, she jogged off to reunite with the rest of her team.

"Kenta, I can take care of myself," Katsumi complained when Ino was out of earshot.

"Of course you can, up until the moment you can't," I declared. "I just want to stop that moment from coming, my Lady."

"Ugh. Fine. Whatever. Let's just go get lunch."

Unlike Katsumi, who was clearly starting to get mildly irritated with my protectiveness, Takeshi skipped along with a happy bounce in his step, and with good reason. That was a stupidly easy victory for us. (Actually, some of those questions were just high-school-level physics, so I technically didn't even need to cheat, so victory in the way we'd done it was just flaunting how easy it was.)

As our silent companion took the lead, the annoyed expression faded from Katsumi's face. I could feel the smile forming on my own at the same time. "One down..."

"Two to go," my cousin finished.

"How about some dango? My treat."

Takeshi stopped on a dime, spun around, and nodded vigorously.

Katsumi laughed. "I think he likes that idea."


	7. 7 Scorching Sun

A/N: Edited this chapter on 1/19/2018

* * *

My breathing was heavy and labored. In, out, in, out...

My feet launched me from branch to branch. In, out, in, out...

It was behind me. It was chasing me...

Breathe, Niko, breathe...

It was dark, I couldn't see. Where was I? How deep was this forest?

In, out, in, out...

Was I even in the forest? It was too dark to tell. I was blind.

In, out, in, out...

Splash.

Water?!

No.

Mud.

It's cold. Thick. Heavy.

I'm sinking.

I don't want to go back into the Abyss!

Take a breath, Niko.

I can't! I'm drowning!

It's cold.

I don't want to go back to the Abyss!

Wait. Hands. I feel hands! I'm saved.

"Let me out, Niko."

No! Not you! Anyone but you!

The hands pushed me down.

"Let me out! Let me feed! We had a deal!"

What deal? I can't remember! I'm still in the mud!

I'm.

Still.

In.

The.

Mud.

"No can do. We had a deal. It's time to pay."

I'm.

Still.

In.

The.

Mud.

"When will you let me out, Niko?"

I'm.

Still.

In.

The.

Mud.

"If you don't want to go back, you'll let me out."

I'm.

Still.

In.

The.

Mud.

"Trust me, it'll be much more fun this way! For both of us! You'll love it."

 **I'm**.

 _Still_.

 **In**.

 _The_.

 **Mud**.

"Wake up, Kenta! Wake—"

* * *

—up!"

There were hands on my shoulders, hands shaking me. No! Not the mud! Not the...

Katsumi?

Wait, what the hell had I been dreaming about? I can't quite... oh.

I remember.

Him.

The voice in the _**ssʎq**_ ꓯ.

There was a price for getting out of the _**ssʎq**_ ꓯ. I don't remember what it is. I don't know what he wants, other than to be "let out." I don't know what that means or how to do it. I think something really bad would happen if I did.

I'm so cold right now.

You know, how in fiction, when you bring someone back to life, how they often come back wrong? Undead, changed, possessed, evil, or just _off?_ Not the _sacrifice yourself to bring someone bac_ k sort of resurrection, but the _necromancer tampering with the natural order_ sort.

I think I might have been the latter.

I was a living brown note, after all.

But I also think there's more to this than meets the eye.

I sat up. Takeshi, Katsumi, and Haruka were all kneeling around me, and all of them looked as pale as ghosts — and that's saying something considering two thirds of them were black.

"Did... did I wake you?"

"And most of the surrounding rooms," Haruka muttered. "You were screaming in that other language of yours and thrashing. You had claws too..."

I looked down at my futon, blankets, and night clothes, which were all shredded by claws I most certainly _did not_ have. My throat burned — I was utterly parched — and my body ached.

This wasn't the first time this had happened, not by a long shot, but it was by far the most vivid. And I'd never done this much damage before. I hadn't had a fit in months, so why now?

Utterly unprompted, the images of Yamanaka Ino and Uzumaki Naruto flashed in my mind's eye. Why them? What did it mean?

" _ **·s**_ ๅ _ **noS"**_

My head snapped towards Takeshi. "What did you just say?"

My teammates and sensei nervously looked among themselves. "Kenta," Katsumi worriedly spoke, "he didn't say anything."

But I heard it. I heard the word _souls_ , clear as day, in _**ɥsı**_ ๅ _ **ɓu**_ ꓱ _ **.**_

Him.

I was hearing Him even while awake.

What the fuck.

I shook my head. "I need to walk."

Extracting myself from my shredded mass of sheets, I grabbed my mask, strapped it to my face, and then marched out of the room, heedless of the protests of my teammates or the fact that my clothes were barely rags hanging from me.

It was dark outside, but the sort of dark that occurs naturally, with the moon, stars, and occasional house light providing the tiniest bit of illumination to keep it from being the total, utter blackness that had been the _**ssʎq**_ ꓯ. But despite the lack of normal light, the infrared glow of the world's warmth painted the landscape in soothing colors that lacked names in any language. And though it did not illuminate the world in the same way as visible or infrared light, the glowing, similarly impossible-to-name colors of chakra around me also soothed my troubled mind.

If I had to guess by the position of the alien moon and stars above me, and by the chill in the air and the dew on the ground, it was early morning, just before the dawn. I felt surprisingly well rested, even considering that I'd just woken up from one hell of a nightmare.

A leaf ninja, out despite the early morning, spotted me and my disheveled appearance. He hopped over. "Sir, are you alright?"

I blinked owlishly, though he couldn't see it under my mask. "Yeah. I... ah... it's not as bad as it looks. I'm not hurt or anything. Thanks, though."

"If you don't mind me asking, how did you get like that?"

"I _do_ mind." Instead of speaking further, I tilted my head back and faced the moon. Ironically, it and the stars were the one things I could not see with my byakugan, for they were beyond the edge of my range. I could see where they were only if I looked without my dōjutsu, though I could tell where they were by the shadows they cast.

Seeing that I wasn't going to answer, the ninja said, "If you say so." He hopped away a second later, leaving me alone with my thoughts.

...I don't want to go back into the _**ssʎq**_ ꓯ _ **.**_

* * *

I didn't sleep for the rest of the early morning. There wasn't really that much time to sleep anyway if I wanted to have breakfast and shower before the second stage of the exam began. It didn't really bother me, as I was more than awake enough already.

While Haruka and Katsumi had gone back to their own room, Takeshi hovered around me, despite my insistence that I was fine. I suspect that Katsumi had asked her friend to look out for me. I must have scared them quite badly last night. I'd insisted that it was just a nightmare, but they didn't believe me. I just wish I hadn't been lying through my teeth.

Breakfast was a simple affair — eggs, toast, and bacon in very large amounts. Carbs for now, protein and fat for later. Sure, I had food packed in my scrolls, but that was no reason not to stock up on energy now. Takeshi seemed to pick up what I was doing without me needing to prompt him, and served himself a double-portion of food as well.

Once we were fully ready for the day (and test) ahead, the two of us reunited with the girls of our team. Haruka gave us directions to the training ground in question, which was some distance outside of Konoha's walls. We hurried there as fast as we could; it wouldn't do for us to even cut it close, let alone even risking the chance of being _late._

A bit annoyingly, we got there a full half-hour early. I think the excitement of last night and the anticipation of today put a bit more of a spring in our step than we'd normally have had. Fortunately, at least for me, Mitarashi Anko was already there. She was easily the sexiest woman here so far, and I was more than willing to allow lust to replace that bit of my emotional capacity that had been laden with dread from the night before.

What can I say? Tits are distracting, and that's a good thing right now.

The curse seal on her neck was also interesting. It was a symbiote, but more on the parasitic end of the spectrum. Chakra was sucked out of her body, consumed, twisted, and mutated by the tiny entity within, and then pumped back in, up to her brain in a hair-thin stream.

Alright, Orochimaru, do you show up now?

"Hey! Cloud ninja!" Ino was waving to us as she walked towards the gathering area.

Curious as to what she had to say, I moved to meet her half-way. "You spoke with your father, I take it?"

"Yeah, I did. It's not as bad as I was expecting. Just a little emotional nudge that makes feeling certain emotions easier and others harder, but not impossible. It also amplifies whatever you're currently feeling. In all honesty, as far as genjutsu and mind jutsu go, it's basically harmless."

I sighed. "That's a relief. Honestly, I was getting a bit over-worried it was something more malicious, but that basically fits with what I'd sensed. The idea of someone messing with my head, or my teammates' heads, really, _really_ bothers me. Thank you, Yamanaka Ino." I bowed my head respectfully.

"No problem. My dad and I are going to drag Naruto to more advanced chakra-control lessons so he stops doing that. Even if it's harmless, it really is quite rude."

"I'm guessing he's a friend of yours?" I probed.

She smiled happily. And was that the faintest trace of a blush I saw? "You could say that."

We're developing a harem!Naruto here, I'm sure of it. That sounds like _fun..._ I do hope the little idiot's also one of those stupidly overpowered ninja that can smash through anything, or he's going to be too distracted to handle Kaguya. And meanwhile, I've got to deal with the _**ssʎq**_ ꓯ haunting me _._ That's so not fair.

"Alright then. Thanks for the information." I turned to head back to my group, though at the last moment before I was out of conversational earshot, I shouted back, "I'll avoid shooting you full of holes during the exam as thanks!"

When I got back to my team, I reported, "Downgrade Uzumaki's master threat rating a bit. I was overreacting."

"Well, that's a relief," Katsumi said.

"It's still emotional manipulation, but I think even mere words might be more potent in the short term," I continued. "Also, speaking of Masters, we need to implement Master/Stranger protocols. I can verify with my eyes if it's a physical or chakra disguise, but we need something for a psychological attack or if I somehow get separated for you."

"Classification for Definition?" Takeshi suggested.

"Like if I said, 'What is a Striker?' and you defined it?" Katsumi clarified. "That's good. Won't work in the future, but right now it's fine."

"Agreed. Alternatively, we could list off the rankings of the one we're talking to," I suggested. "Even if someone guessed the definitions, they'd need detailed info on us to guess the appropriate ranks and classifications," I said, throwing in my two cents.

"Or we could do both?"

"Mixture," Takeshi affirmed. "Randomly."

"That takes care of that." My attention wandered back to Anko, who was talking with some of the chūnin assisting her in this exam, then to her tits, and finally to the clusters of approaching shinobi that were slowly filtering in. Among them, I could see Gaara and Naruto approaching from different angles, both immediately obvious due to their bright chakra. "Containers incoming," I alerted my team.

When the Suna jinchūriki's team arrived, both Temari and Kankurō flinched when they saw my mask, while Gaara gave me a bored stare. But, other than that, they did not interact with us at all and continued closer to the booth set up in front of the fence. As for the other three...

My team did a good job of ignoring the three of them, of pretending that they hadn't noticed the rich blue, the bright red, or the brilliant orange of their uniforms among the sea of brown and gray outfits that made up the majority of the gathered genins' clothing. Unfortunately, the reverse wasn't exactly true — a swordsman with an oni mask, a black woman with a bound but exposed chest, and a big, shirtless, black man with a dragon mask. We ourselves didn't exactly blend in, even among other weird outfits.

"Dragon guy!" Naruto shouted, stomping up to me.

I turned my head vaguely in his direction. "Yes...?" I drawled, slow and lazy. The chakra was still swirling around his head, so I swatted at it with my own and pushed back until he was standing in an invisible cloud of my own chakra. His hair stood up from the static it induced, while his posture wilted a bit.

With a little less bravado than just a moment before — this contest of willpower made manifest was definitely swinging in my favor — he said, "Can I talk to you? _Alone?_ It's about yesterday."

"If you don't mind my teammates hanging out with yours..." I answered.

"We don't mind," Sakura said. Sasuke shrugged.

"Alright, Uzumaki Naruto." I looked back at my teammates. "Thinker/Blaster and Striker." I motioned to the two in question. "The game has already stated. Understood?"

Both my teammates nodded.

"Let's go."

* * *

We sat behind a large boulder, out of sight and hearing range of the gathering crowd of genin. "Let's make this quick. I don't think either of us want to fail this."

"How the hell do you know about Kurama?!"

"... I can see him inside of you. I suppose I can tell you how since I already know that secret of yours." I fought down the temptation to unmask myself to him. Instead, I lied-by-omission, "I'm a very powerful sensor. I can feel the world around me and see things that are hidden, including what's inside that seal of yours. Now, if that's all you wanted to know..."

Naruto shook his head. "Kurama wanted to talk to you."

"... A bijū... wants to talk with _me._ Well, at the risk of being squished by a very angry, very big fox, why not? I _assume_ you're not going to just summon him out here."

Instead, Naruto offered his hand. "Just grab my hand. Kurama will do the rest."

I hesitated. This would be his chakra directly interacting with my own. Naruto wasn't acting like this was a trap, but early Kurama was very hateful. I couldn't exactly trust him, right?

My curiosity got the better of me. Relenting, I grabbed his hand, then splashed as my feet landed in the water.

I blinked. My mind rebooted from the sudden change.

That was _fast_. That was _really fucking fast_. The only obvious change to myself that suggested I hadn't just been teleported, was that despite my byakugan suddenly being deactivated, I could still see through the mask on my face. It made sense; I was now in the sewer of Naruto's mind, and he couldn't possibly understand what the world looked like through a byakugan.

In front of me, Kurama lounged on his side in a pose that was a cross between that of a canine and that of a human. He looked basically how he'd been drawn in the series, with one notable exception: Kurama was most _definitely_ an anatomical male.

Holy fuck, go away furry macro fetish. Now is absolutely not the time for you. Stupid brain-between-the-legs. "You're not what I expected," I said.

"And you're the first person to react to my presence with _arousal_ ," Kurama replied, clearly amused.

I looked down at myself. Shit, I had a boner. I mean, I almost always had a boner considering the whole _double puberty_ thing, but having one _now_ was just ridiculous.

"It is remarkably refreshing not to be looked at with fear or defiance," the massive bijū said. "A shame it had to be _you_ who sees in that way."

"Oh?" It was hard not to be offended by that. "And might I ask _why_ I'm the problem?"

"My brat, Naruto, was just starting to trust me. He came to me, not long ago, desperate for any comfort. I earned his trust and gave him gifts, some of which I... _neglected_ to tell him about. In exposing them, you hurt him and, by extension, his trust in me," Kurama explained.

"I really don't like having my mind influenced," I countered. I didn't need my byakugan to see the annoyed twitch of Kurama's tails. They all drooped at the same time, stilled, and then went back to their usual waving. "You don't either, I'm guessing."

"What I've done is _hardly_ mind control. I don't care what you think," he growled. But he must have, or he wouldn't have defended himself, I figured. "All I care about is you staying out of my host's business, _or else_."

"Well, that _was_ the plan. My orders were to avoid contact whenever reasonably possible," I said. "But if you don't mind, what is the _'or else'_ you had in mind?"

Much to my horrified surprise, his hand-paw shot through the bars and snatched my ethereal form, dragging it into the cell. I screamed. The bijū pinned me to the floor with a single, massive finger-claw. "The seal protects _Naruto_ from me. You? You're fair game. And while I can't harm you _physically_ , I sure as hell can torment you in other ways. And just think, that bloodline of yours accelerates your perception of time based on how much chakra you have. If, hypothetically, I gave you a bit of mine..." He leaned over me, his breath hot and rancid on my skin. "You'd be stuck in here for a _very long time._ "

He withdrew his claw, allowing me to stand once more. "Right," I agreed hastily, "No messing with Naruto. Who you apparently want to have a harem. Why?"

"I can feel what he feels," Kurama explained. "I have been imprisoned for a _very_ long time in two jinchūriki who didn't have the same anatomy as me. I _need_ this. And if the brat just so happens to get some much-needed love at the same time, who am I to complain? He's already a far better host than my previous ones."

"Well, if you need relief," my mouth began. My eyes widened. What was I saying?! No, mouth! _STHAP!_ " _We_ could always, you know..."

No.

Why, mouth?

Why did you betray me?!

...

I just propositioned to the Kyūbi for sex. I am so dead. I am so _very_ dead.

...

Why hasn't he squashed me yet? Why hasn't he said anything?

I opened my eyes again. Kurama's staring at me, a snarl forming on his lips.

No. That's not a snarl. That's a grin.

A deep rumbling filled the seal's cavernous chamber — Kurama's laughter. "You! Never has a human entertained me so! _Hah!_ Don't be ridiculous."

Blushing furiously, I replied, "As much as I'm mortified that I actually suggested it, I... wasn't actually joking. I'm... yeah, I'm just going to go now."

"You amuse me, Kaminyojin Kenta. I might just take you up on that offer one day," Kurama laughed. "But until then..."

Then, just as abruptly as I'd been drawn into his mindscape, I was free once more. Still blushing, I looked at Naruto. "Were you listening to that?"

"Nope, couldn't hear a thing," Naruto answered. He seemed honest about it too. "What did you talk about?"

"Mostly private stuff. He didn't want me bothering you, but, ah, I think we sort of became friends. Maybe?"

That seemed like the right thing to say, for Naruto's face bloomed into a brilliant smile. "Kurama's a bit of a jerk. He didn't tell me what he did to me and now everybody is mad at me for messing with their heads, but I think he means well. It's good that you two are friends. Maybe we can be friends as well."

Oh, Naruto, stay innocent. Blush finally fading, I cleared my throat. "Well, um, let's get back to our teams."

"Right!"

* * *

"What was that about?" Katsumi asked as I rejoined them.

"Err... I'll tell you later. It was a bit strange. Now, the test..."

My cousin handed me a paper. "The proctor handed out these waivers and gave us thirty minutes to read and sign them before we can get our scroll," she informed me.

I took it and read through it quickly. It was standard stuff, no liability, blah blah blah. The interesting bit was that in signing it, you basically surrendered your human right to life to the other examinees for the duration of the test — the duration being however long it took you to exit. It was carefully worded, but it effectively gave _carte blanche_ to kill, even if there were preliminaries.

If I happened to have given my signature a little bit more flourish than usual, it had nothing to do with me being excited to kill. That said, I must admit, I _had_ murdered before, even in my first life. I swear it was justified, but I must confess, killing thrilled me like nothing else before, and nothing else since. (Well, except for propositioning a bijū, but that's in a category all on its own.) Oh, I knew it was a horrible thing, and I hated myself for liking it, but...

And I mean, nobody forced me to become a soldier for hire, nobody insisted I become the world's best sniper. Maybe that's the reason I don't give a fuck about love and why I didn't mourn the loss of my old family.

You know, I'm not really a religious person, but _maybe_ there was a reason I fell into the _**ssʎq**_ ꓯ _ **.**_ I'm about 80% sure that's not why, but the thought lingers...

Anyway, with the forms signed, we were allowed to trade for our scroll. I jotted down which teams had which scrolls and where we were set to enter the Forest of Death from. Unfortunately, it seemed we had only Earth scrolls like us on either side of us, so we'd have to travel a bit to find a good team to fight.

And speaking of fighting... "A question for the two of you: while I will do the utmost to ensure you win, how hard should I fight in the beginning?"

"What do you mean?" Katsumi asked. In her hand, she held one of the numerous small rocks she was charging with her explosives chakra. Thanks to an application she'd found with her other bloodline, this one would explode into lightning, not fire.

"I'm fairly sure that with some of my larger cannons, I could fire one shot that smashes us a tunnel from here to the tower, but it would utterly drain me. Or, I could _merely_ fight with just my bow and line of sight. The battles would be harder, but we'd neither give up our position and it would give you two an opportunity to fight. Hell, I could even completely back off and let you two do everything, only swooping in to save you at the last minute if something goes wrong."

Which it probably would.

"Obviously, I would _love_ to minimize risks and expedite your exams, but this is meant to be a test of your skills." I faced each of them in turn. "I can't in good conscience steal this opportunity from you. What do you say?"

The two of them turned to each other. Once again, a silent conversation passed between them, one that I could read well enough but didn't act upon until they spoke aloud. "Kenta, we would like to do this test ourselves, with two exceptions. We would like to use your eyes, and we would like you to interfere only in dire situations," Katsumi declared.

"And you're in agreement with Katsumi, Takeshi?"

He nodded and gave me two thumbs up.

"Then I will protect you if you need it, and otherwise let you fight for yourselves." I bowed a little bit. "And on a more personal note, I think that decision will reflect well on your reputation in the eyes of Lord Ay."

"There's that," Katsumi acknowledged, "but mostly we want a good fight."

"Well, if you want a good fight," I began, simultaneously tallying up everyone I could see from our gate, "Here are your options..."


End file.
